Polio and The Public Health Crisis in Gaza

In mid-July, reports began to emerge from the Gaza Strip that polio was detected in the water. Days later, the Gaza Ministry of Health declared a polio epidemic and called for “immediate intervention to end the [Israeli] aggression and find radical solutions” to the worsening public health crisis in the Strip. The World Health Organization (WHO) said it was sending more than one million polio vaccines to Gaza to be administered over the coming weeks to prevent children from being infected. But whether Israel would open up the borders to allow the vaccines in remains to be seen. In this episode, host Yumna Patel speaks with Yara Asi, a Palestinian public health expert, about the consequences this latest development could have for public health in Gaza and the world, where most strains of the polio virus have effectively been eradicated. Yara M. Asi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and Informatics and Co-Director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals, The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, and other outlets. She is the author of How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to our Health (2024).

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