Polio: Israel’s dirty bio-weapon is bringing Gaza to its knees
Palestinians walk past sewage flowing into the streets of the southern town of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, 4 July 2024
Alex Foley writes in The New Arab on 15 August 2024:
In the break room of the Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford sits a bookcase filled with ceramic replicas of bedpans. The bed pans are a homage to the work carried out by Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and their colleagues in the 1940s at the department making penicillin and demonstrating its efficacy in fighting bacterial infections. They used bedpans as enormous flasks to culture the Penicillium notatum mould. When I was a PhD student in the department, I used to gaze on the simple, beige vessels and sense the gravity of the research being carried out by my colleagues.
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Poliomyelitis has been detected in sewage samples in Gaza, and Gaza’s Ministry of Health has declared a polio epidemic. Highly infectious, the usual transmission pathway is a faecal-oral route, but the disease can spread through a common vehicle like the contaminated water that has been widely reported on in Gaza.
Once ingested, poliovirus replicates in the intestine, from which the virus can spread to the blood, other tissues such as fat and muscle, and crucially, in rare cases, the central nervous system.
In about 1% of cases, the poliovirus causes death of nerve cells, resulting in either paralysis or death. While there are currently no reports of paralytic polio, the breakdown of Gaza’s healthcare system and the sheer number and variety of injuries and diseases occurring make detection difficult. There is no cure for polio infection, only prevention through vaccination.