The WHO polio vaccination campaign covers 5 million Yemeni children

Humanitarian agencies have launched a polio vaccination campaign in Yemen to vaccinate up to five million children under five in this impoverished Arab state, whose health care system has been paralyzed by more than three years of war.

The three-day campaign that began Monday is organized by the United Nations Children's Agency UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Houthi Ministry of Health, which controls most of the population centers of the country where millions of people are threatened with hunger for disease.

"The campaign comes at a very critical time," said Meritxell Relano, Unicef ​​representative in Yemen. "The absence of a fully functional health system and widespread malnutrition have greatly increased the risk of preventable diseases." It is very important that all parties to the conflict allow unimpeded access to reach all children, from north to south, from east to west, with this vital vaccine. "

A Saudi-led coalition intervened in the Yemeni civil war in 2015 against the Houthi movement aligned with Iran to restore internationally recognized government, causing the world's most urgent humanitarian crisis. Save the Children said last week that about 85,000 children under five could have died of extreme hunger.

Yemen was declared polio-free in 2009, but experts say conflict-affected countries are particularly vulnerable to epidemics because of the disruption of their health systems.

Yemen also conducted a vaccination campaign in February 2017 against polio, which spreads rapidly among children and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours.

On Monday in Sanaa, the capital of the Houthis, nurses administered oral vaccines to dusty street children, some of whom cried and tried to wriggle.

They marked the fingers of the vaccinated children with black markers and used white chalk on the doors of the covered houses in the driveway. – Reuters

"Thank you to this vaccination team who, in these difficult times, when the population needs every riyal, decided to pbad in front of each house, thus saving the transport costs and the efforts of the population," said Abdo Ahmed Ali , a resident of Sanaa.

"That's why we must thank them wholeheartedly."

Yemen is home to the world's worst cholera outbreak, with 10,000 reported cases reported per week, the WHO announced last month.

16% of cholera cases in Yemen occurred in the main port city of Hodeidah, at the center of the war, where only half of the health facilities are operational.

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