Another case of polio has been found by researchers in war torn Ukraine, prompting speculation that the current outbreak could spread even further throughout conflict afflicted areas and into neighbouring countries.
UNICEF has called the outbreak a threat to every child in Ukraine.
On October 6, 2021, the first case of paralytic poliomyelitis was identified in a 1.5-year-old child from Western Ukraine and since January 2022, a further 19 cases of paralytic polio have now been confirmed in the region.
The latest case of poliovirus is genetically similar to an environmental sample from Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
A public health emergency has been declared in the provinces of Rivne and Zakarpattia and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health is working with international partners to develop a unified strategy to respond to the outbreak.
These measures include strengthening surveillance nationally, immunization efforts for unvaccinated children under 6 years of age, as well as advocacy and communications activities.
The polio research team, led by Dmytro Stepanskyi, the head of the Department of Microbiology, Virology, Immunology and Epidemiology at Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Medical Academy, presented their findings in Washington at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (June 9 – 13).
They explained that the situation has been exacerbated by the war, the COVID pandemic, and recent healthcare reforms.
“The reintroduction of the wild-type poliovirus or circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV) is a sizeable threat in the Ukraine, which is considered a high-risk country for vaccine-preventable infections,” Dr Stepanskyi said.
“The invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, led to thousands of victims, occupied territories, millions of refugees and internally displaced persons.
“All this disrupted access to medical care, significantly disrupted routine vaccinations and the response to the polio outbreak in Ukraine.”
Dr Stepanskyi explained that the high risk of spread is due to low immunization (73.3% as of December 2021) and gaps in immunization at the regional level.
“These factors [also] lead to high risks of international spread of the virus to polio-free countries,” he said.
Before the war, on December 30, 2021, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health approved an action plan for ‘responding to the outbreak of circulating vaccine-related poliovirus type 2,’ for the regions of Kyiv and Sevastopol.
And in January 2022, UNICEF’s representative in Ukraine, Murat Sahih, called upon “all Ukrainian parents to get their children vaccinated according to the national immunization calendar as soon as possible.”
“Polio anywhere is a threat to children everywhere, [and] vaccination is the only effective way to protect every child and stop the outbreak,” Mr Sahih said.
Yet unsurprisingly, following the outbreak of war just one month later, Ukrainian authorities have struggled with implementation – it can only be hoped that the suggested new measures will be any more effective.