/ picture alliance, Shahzaib Akber
Tel Aviv – Israel is launching a vaccination campaign to stop the spread of the disease following an outbreak of vaccine polio in Jerusalem. So far, around 20,000 people have been vaccinated, the Ministry of Health announced last night.
The campaign was launched following vaccine polio was discovered in a four-year-old child in Jerusalem in early March. The child was not vaccinated and had been infected by someone else’s live polio vaccine.
Six such cases are now known, at least one of them with symptoms. All those affected were unvaccinated. The Ministry of Health is also examining wastewater nationwide for polioviruses. Corresponding finds had already been made in several cities, it said.
Since 2013, Israel has been vaccinating once more with the live vaccine once morest the polio virus, since 2014 in a combination with the inactivated vaccine. The authorities had discovered wild polioviruses in sewage in the south of the country in 2013. The live vaccine is considered more effective than the inactivated vaccine, but carries the risk of infection for unvaccinated people with poliovirus excreted by vaccinated people.
Israel began vaccination once morest the polio virus in 1957. According to the Department of Health, the last documented case of wild polio was in 1988.
A wild polio case was discovered in Malawi in early March, the first in Africa in years. By then, all countries except Afghanistan and Pakistan had officially eliminated wild polio. © dpa/aerzteblatt.de
