Health Care Situation (also see Gaza Health Care)
Updated 2024-08-25
2024-08-17 UN Secretary-General Urges ‘Polio Pause’ in Israeli War on Gaza as First Case Reported “It is impossible to conduct a polio vaccination campaign with war raging all over,” said António Guterres after a 10-month-old infant became Gaza’s first new poliomyelitis case in 25 years.
Following over a month of warnings, Gaza recorded its first case of polio since the highly contagious virus was eradicated there 25 years ago, prompting a Friday call by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for a temporary truce to enable a vaccination drive in the embattled strip.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that an 10-month-old infant in the central city of Deir al-Balah “who has not received any polio vaccine dose” has tested positive for the virus, which often causes paralysis and can be fatal. The ministry said the baby is one of “a number of children” who have presented with symptoms consistent with polio in recent days. https://www.commondreams.org/news/polio-in-gaza
2024-07-29 Palestinian Health Officials Declare Polio Epidemic in Gaza The Gaza Ministry of Health said on Monday that they now consider Gaza to be a polio epidemic area due to Israel’s relentless assault and deadly humanitarian blockade, portending yet more horrific circumstances being forced on Palestinians in coming months unless Israeli officials agree to a ceasefire soon.
Health officials declared the epidemic in a post on Telegram and warned that it will not only affect Palestinians in Gaza, but also people in neighboring countries. The announcement comes after international health officials announced earlier this month that they had detected the virus that causes polio, specifically polio type 2, in multiple wastewater samples from across Gaza.
The epidemic “poses a health threat to the people of Gaza, to neighboring countries, and a setback to global efforts to end polio,” the ministry said. It called for “immediate intervention” to end Israel’s genocide and address the sanitation catastrophe that has resulted from Israel’s assault on Gaza’s sanitation system. https://truthout.org/articles/palestinian-health-officials-declare-polio-epidemic-in-gaza/
2024-07-25 US Health Workers Back From Gaza Calculate Death Toll at 92,000 — at a Minimum ozens of U.S. doctors and nurses who have returned from volunteer trips to Gaza say in a scathing new letter that Israel’s assault, along with the famine and epidemics raging across Gaza, have killed a conservative estimate of at least 92,000 Palestinians so far — over double the widely-cited official death count by health officials.
In their message sent to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the first lady on Thursday, the group of 45 health care workers say that the things they saw in Gaza are beyond anything they have seen in other conflicts, and will forever be seared in their minds.
“President and Dr. Biden, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them,” they wrote. “We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot believe that anyone would continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children after seeing what we have seen.” https://truthout.org/articles/us-health-workers-back-from-gaza-calculate-death-toll-at-92000-at-a-minimum/
2024-07-22 Advocates Say Biden Must Immediately Act to Stop Polio Outbreak in Gaza Advocates for Palestinian rights are demanding that the Biden administration take urgent action to stop a potential outbreak of polio in Gaza after the virus that causes the deadly disease was found in Gaza’s wastewater, threatening an epidemic that would be nothing short of catastrophic.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that Biden bears responsibility to respond to the crisis after funding Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health and sanitation systems, which has created conditions ripe for a deadly epidemic.
“Having enabled the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure and medical facilities in Gaza, the Biden administration has a duty to ensure that polio vaccines reach all those who need to be vaccinated,” said CAIR communications director Ibrahim Hooper in a statement Sunday.https://truthout.org/articles/advocates-say-biden-must-immediately-act-to-stop-polio-outbreak-in-gaza/
2024-07-19 Public Health Authorities Raise Alarm as Poliovirus Is Found in Gaza Sewage 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.https://truthout.org/articles/public-health-authorities-raise-alarm-as-poliovirus-is-found-in-gaza-sewage/
2024-02-07 War on Gaza: Red Cross warns of ‘catastrophic’ health situation for chronically ill patients The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said there is a “catastrophic” healthcare situation in the Gaza Strip, as it warned there might only be two functioning hospitals left for the whole population in the coming days.
Speaking to Middle East Eye, the organisation’s chief protection officer, Christian Cardon de Lichtbuer, said the healthcare infrastructure of the enclave had been left in “survival mode” following months of Israeli bombardment. “There are still three hospitals functioning, and probably in the coming days, only two hospitals for a population of 2.3 million. These are facts, and this is catastrophic,” he explained. Lichtbuer said that all medical teams in Gaza were focused on dealing with emergency treatment, and that meant people with chronic illnesses and conditions were being neglected. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/gaza-red-cross-hospitals-catastrophic
2023-11-30 “Horror Show”: Doctors Without Borders Demands Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza, Medical Aid for Wounded We get an update from Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and violence hospitals are facing in the occupied West Bank. Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinian children Wednesday during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp, and medical workers say they were blocked from reaching the camp to treat the wounded. “Under humanitarian law, anyone should be able to reach a hospital,” says Benoît, who is demanding a “proper ceasefire” in the region to allow medical aid to reach people devastated by Israel’s war. She says the prospect of Israel resuming its bombardment of Gaza, including in the south where people were ordered to move, would be “a horror show.” Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ayEey38s94
2023-11-28 There’s No Justification for Destroying Gaza’s Health Infrastructure As the health care system in Gaza collapses from more than seven weeks of targeted Israeli bombardment and complete siege, medical institutions in the United States have been silent. Worse, they have attempted to justify the violence. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Nov. 8, 2023, published an essay that we felt created moral ambiguity around bombing hospitals in Gaza.
We are physicians, and in countless private conversations with other physicians, nurses, and medical workers around the U.S., we hear whispers about people being afraid to lose their jobs if they show support for Palestinians. They have been instructed by their leadership not to say the words “Gaza” or “genocide” in their professional roles, while they watch Israeli forces bomb hospitals, murder health care providers, and assault ICU patients. Many health care workers are discovering—much to their surprise—how many people in leadership roles in their institutions support ethnonationalism, even when health care workers and hospitals are targets.
We wrote the following essay in response to JAMA’s promotion of ethical ambiguity around bombing hospitals. It was rejected for publication—yet another act of institutional silencing. As Israeli media now tours the Gaza hospitals that Israel destroyed, alleging these were military targets, we see no Hamas command center. But we do see thousands of dead patients—many of them children—and hundreds of dead medical workers as a result of Israel’s unprecedented violence. https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2023/11/28/hospital-israel-bombing-gaza
2023-11-09 Infectious Diseases Surging in Gaza Amid Israeli Siege, Healthcare System Collapse “The humanitarian suffering in Gaza has already reached catastrophic levels, and it’s set to get worse unless something changes immediately,” said one human rights official. The infectious disease outbreaks that doctors on the ground, public health officials, and humanitarian groups have been warning about for weeks in Gaza appear to be in full force, the World Health Organization said Thursday as it reiterated its call for a cease-fire to save lives.
The global public health organization said authorities have reported a surge in cases of diarrhea, with more than half of those affected children under the age of 5, as Israel’s decision to cut off fuel access in the blockaded enclave has shut down water desalination plants and disrupted waste collection. The circumstances have created “an environment conducive to the rapid and widespread proliferation of insects, rodents that can carry and transit diseases.”
By Thursday, said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, all of Gaza’s 120 municipal water wells were expected to be depleted.
Health officials in the blockaded enclave, where nearly 11,000 civilians have now been killed, are also reporting nearly 9,000 cases of scabies and lice; 12,600 cases of skin rashes; more than 1,000 reports of chickenpox; and nearly 55,000 cases of upper respiratory infections as roughly 1.5 million displaced people crowd into hospitals, churches, schools, and shelters in search of safety from Israel’s relentless bombardment. https://www.commondreams.org/news/infectious-diseases-gaza
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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