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infectious disease
'Ticking Time Bomb': International Alarm as Poliovirus Found in Gaza Sewage
"Detecting the virus that causes polio in wastewater heralds a real health disaster," Gaza's health ministry said.
Jul 19, 2024
Poliovirus has been detected in sewage samples at six locations in the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization said on Friday, following announcements from both the Israel and Gaza health ministries.
Vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 was found in samples taken on June 23 from sites in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.
Public health authorities expressed grave concerns about the findings, which, though no cases have yet been discovered, raise the possibility of an outbreak of polio, a highly infectious disease that often causes paralysis and can be fatal.
"Detecting the virus that causes polio in wastewater heralds a real health disaster and exposes thousands of residents to the risk of contracting polio," Gaza's health ministry said in a statement.
Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician, toldAl Jazeera the presence of the poliovirus was a "ticking time bomb," especially given the lack of ability to isolate and care for people who contract the disease.
Haj-Hassan warned that it would be “catastrophic" if the disease spread among healthcare workers, given that the medical system has already been "annihilated by direct targeting, by abductions of healthcare workers, by [the] killing of healthcare workers."
Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst, called news of the presence poliovirus "absolutely shocking, stunning, [and] unthinkable" in a series of social media posts.
"The health crisis in Gaza has been catastrophic from the start," Scheindlin wrote, seemingly addressing Israelis. "If you're incapable of realizing that civilians should never have been in this situation, maybe the prospect of anyone getting polio, river to sea, where we are 'one epidemiological family,' will get through."
Yes, it's happened. Polio detected in #Gaza sewage. IDF wants all soliders vaccinated/boosted. Live btwn river & sea and scared? you should be. Know what wd work well? Stopping the war, immediate rehab of Gaza's health system & all civilian infrastructure 1/7 🧵
— Dahlia Scheindlin (@dahliasc) July 18, 2024
Conditions in Gaza have been ripe for an outbreak of infectious disease—the "perfect environment" for transmission, as WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier called it, citing "decimation of the health system, lack of security, access obstruction, constant population displacement, shortages of medical supplies, poor quality of water and weakened sanitation."
In late June, The Associated Pressreported on the nightmarish situation in Deir al-Balah, one of the areas where the poliovirus has since been discovered:
Children in sandals trudge through water contaminated with sewage and scale growing mounds of garbage in Gaza's crowded tent camps for displaced families. People relieve themselves in burlap-covered pits, with nowhere nearby to wash their hands.
Polio, which can spread through contact with the stool of an infected person, has been eliminated from much of the world following the development of a vaccine in the early 1950s and a campaign by U.N. agencies that began in 1980. Still, it hasn't been eradicated globally, and there's been a resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years.
Gaza has been polio-free for 25 years and 95% of the population was vaccinated against the disease as of 2022, according to the WHO, though Haj-Hassan, the pediatrician, said that many Gazans, including newborns, have gone without vaccines or boosters for the last nine months.
The WHO said that it's working with other U.N. agencies and health authorities in Gaza to assess how much the poliovirus has spread and determine what measures may be needed, including a "prompt" vaccination campaign.
Combatting any infectious diseases will present challenges for Gaza's public healthcare system, which has been embattled and largely destroyed by Israeli forces. Only 16 out of the enclave's 36 hospitals are even partially functional, and only 45 of the 105 primary health care facilities are operational, according to the WHO.
The lack of medical care is part of a broader public health disaster, people on the ground in Gaza say.
"We're talking about a very grim medical reality," said Tareq Abu Azzoum, an Al Jazeera journalist reporting from Deir al-Balah, which faces severe overcrowding due to the roughly 700,000 displaced Gazans who have fled there.
Abu Azzoum cited Israeli military tactics as a reason for the dire conditions, arguing that the problems stem from attacks on "water wells, sanitation, and water waste treatment" and the blocking of "essential hygiene supplies."
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Disease, Fueled by Blockade, Could Be Bigger Killer Than Bombs in Gaza: WHO
"Eventually we will see more people dying from disease than from bombardment if we are not able to put back together this health system," said a spokesperson for the global health agency.
Nov 28, 2023
With the brief "humanitarian pause" between Israel and Hamas so far failing to result in the delivery of sufficient aid in Gaza, United Nations officials on Tuesday warned that the spread of disease could soon begin killing more Palestinian people than Israel's bombs and raids.
Humanitarian groups have warned for weeks that Israel's total blockade of Gaza—cutting off deliveries of fuel, water, food, and electricity access—quickly fueled outbreaks of gastrointestinal illnesses as sanitation and water treatment services ground to a halt.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has now recorded more than 44,000 cases of diarrhea and 70,000 acute respiratory infections in Gaza since Israel began its latest bombardment of the enclave on October 7, with cases of gastrointestinal illness for those aged five and older rising to more than 100 times the normal level earlier this month.
"Everybody everywhere has dire health needs now because they are starving, because they lack clean water and they're crowded together," said Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for WHO, at a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday. "Basically, if you're sick, if your child has diarrhea, if you've got a respiratory infection, you're not going to get any [help]."
"Eventually we will see more people dying from disease than from bombardment if we are not able to put back together this health system," she added.
On social media, WHO reiterated its call for a permanent negotiated cease-fire and sustained aid access in Gaza to allow health officials to rebuild the decimated medical system.
Out of 36 hospitals in Gaza, about 26—or three-quarters—have entirely shut down due to damage from bombings and an inability to provide care to patients. Without fuel shipments and reliable electricity, doctors have been unable to run machinery needed to properly sterilize medical equipment, among other necessities.
Although the current truce has been in place for four days and was extended by two days on Tuesday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that no fuel has arrived in northern Gaza for hospitals to run generators.
One doctor from al-Shifa Hospital, which was raided by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) earlier this month, told the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) that primary threats to children's safety were previously "very much from the air and now very much on the ground," as gastrointestinal and respiratory infections continue spreading.
"He was terrified as a medical professional in terms of the disease outbreak that is that is lurking here and how that will devastate children whose immune systems and lack of food…is making them perilously weak," UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said Tuesday.
At hospitals throughout Gaza, Elder said in a video briefing, "I met a lot of parents... They know exactly what their children need. They don't have access to safe water and it's crippling them."
Since last month, United Nations agencies and groups including Oxfam have warned that, cut off from access to clean water, Palestinians face an even more dire public health threat than the diseases that are already spreading: a potential cholera outbreak like the one that killed at least 97 people in 2022 in Syria and Lebanon.
"It's conceivable that the bacterium has been brought in and the conditions are now ripe for its spread," Richard Brennan, regional emergency director for WHO, told Al Jazeera in October.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) told the BBC Tuesday that about 200 aid trucks per day have been allowed into Gaza since the humanitarian pause began last week—an improvement over the roughly 45 trucks that entered the enclave each day before the truce, but only half the amount that brought aid to Gaza's 2.3 million residents daily before October 7.
"The situation has become more than dire and this aid is urgently and critically needed," PRCS spokesperson Nebal Farsakh told the BBC.
Amnesty International warned that Palestinian civil society groups are struggling to serve injured, ill, displaced, and traumatized residents as a number of European countries and the European Commission have suspended or restricted aid funding due to "unfounded allegations that funding has been diverted to 'terrorist organizations' or used for 'incitement to hatred and violence'."
The European Commission introduced "anti-incitement" clauses in all new contracts with Palestinian NGOs, subjecting them to third-party monitoring, even as it announced on November 21 that "no evidence has been found to date that money has been diverted for unintended purposes."
"Restricting the funding of Palestinian organizations only is discriminatory and would silence them by hampering their vital work and would further deprive victims of any prospect of protection," said Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International's European Institutions Office.
"The credibility of European states who claim to champion human rights has already been already weakened by their failure to call for a cease-fire and by continuing to arm Israel as it kills thousands of Palestinians with impunity," added Geddie. "These discriminatory funding restrictions are damaging their credibility even further."
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Study Warns Human Health Still 'At the Mercy' of Fossil Fuels
"Further expansion of fossil fuels is reckless and the data clearly shows that it threatens the health and well-being of every person," one report author said.
Nov 15, 2023
Heat-related deaths could rise by 370% if policymakers and energy executives allow temperatures to rise by 2°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, a new Lancet study found.
The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change on Tuesday released its eighth annual report tracking the impact of the climate crisis on global health. It is the first to offer projections for the future. In particular, the report authors emphasized the need to phase out fossil fuels that are baking the planet, putting human health and the Earth's systems that sustain it at risk.
"The diagnosis in this report is very clear," Dr. Renee Salas, one of the 114 scientists behind the report who also works in emergency care at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, toldThe New York Times. "Further expansion of fossil fuels is reckless and the data clearly shows that it threatens the health and well-being of every person."
The report first describes how the climate crisis is currently impacting health. 2023 saw the highest temperatures in more than 100,000 years, and this has exposed more people to dangerous heat, including the most vulnerable. Infants younger than 1 and adults older than 65 were exposed to double the heatwave days that they were between 1986 and 2005. What's more, heat-related deaths for those over 65 have climbed by 85% compared with 1990 through 2000.
In the U.S. alone, heat-related deaths for those over 65 increased by 88% from 2018 to 2022 compared with 2000 to 2004, and approximately 23,200 elderly adults died of heat exposure last year.
"These numbers remind me of the elderly patients I see in my own hospital with heatstroke," Salas told the Times.
"This is an industry that is actually killing people in large numbers and making them ill in even larger numbers."
Yet as stark as the U.S. numbers are, the report also points to growing inequalities between health outcomes in richer and poorer nations.
"We're facing a crisis on top of a crisis," Georgiana Gordon-Strachan, who directs The Lancet Countdown Regional Center for Small Island Developing States, toldEuronews.
"People living in poorer countries, who are often least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, are bearing the brunt of the health impacts, but are least able to access funding and technical capacity to adapt to the deadly storms, rising seas, and crop-withering droughts worsened by global heating," Gordon-Strachan said.
The report calls out the fossil fuel industry in particular, and says that the world is moving in the wrong direction in weening itself off of oil, gas, and coal.
"In 2022, The Lancet Countdown warned that people's health is at the mercy of fossil fuels and stressed the transformative opportunity of jointly tackling the concurrent climate change, energy, cost-of-living, and health crises for human health and well-being," the report authors said. "This year's report finds few signs of such progress."
For example, the authors noted that the early 2023 plans of the world's top 20 fossil fuel companies would overshoot the Paris agreement goals by 173% by 2040.
"All our indicators on the fossil fuel industry are extremely relevant because this is an industry that is actually killing people in large numbers and making them ill in even larger numbers," report co-author Paul Ekins, a University College of London economist, toldThe Associated Press.
If this level of inaction continues, the report's current indicators "could be just an early symptom of a very dangerous future unless we tackle climate change urgently," Lancet Countdown executive director Marina Romanello told AP .
If temperatures rise to 2°C above preindustrial levels by 2100, every health hazard tracked by the report will increase, Axios reported.
In this case, heat-related deaths would rise by 370% for people over 65 by mid-century and 683% by the last two decades of the century. If world leaders don't do anything to either prevent or adapt to climate change, those numbers would rise to 433% and 1,537% respectively. In the 2°C scenario, labor loss due to heat would rise by 50% by mid-century and heatwaves could push 524.9 million more people into food insecurity.
The risk of infectious diseases would also increase, with the ideal coastal conditions for the Vibrio pathogen increasing by 17% to 25% and the chance of catching dengue increasing by 36% to 37%.
However, the report said it was not too late to take action. Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels would both reduce climate risks and prevent many of the 1.9 million deaths every year due to air pollution from the burning of dirty fuels.
"There is still room for hope," Romanello told Euronoews, adding that the planned focus on health at the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP28, presented "the opportunity of our lifetime."
"If climate negotiations drive an equitable and rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, accelerate mitigation, and support adaptation efforts for health, the ambitions of the Paris agreement to limit global heating to 1.5°C are still achievable, and a prosperous healthy future lies within reach," Romanello said.
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