In Israel’s efforts to root out Hamas terrorists in Gaza, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed over the past 11 months, of whom more than 14,000 were children.
Amid the devastation, order has been lost and chaos reigns, resulting in much human misery and hardship. Basic needs such as food and shelter are absent, sewage systems have been destroyed, water contaminated, health care infrastructure from neighbourhood clinics to hospitals blown to pieces.
The urgent need to attend to the gravest of injuries has understandably been a top priority of any medical workers still alive and able to respond. Among the casualties has been the capacity to maintain basic health services, and among the consequences has been the re-emergence of polio.
In 1988, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and by 2022 the disease was eliminated in almost every country of the world. According to WHO, the eradication of polio requires that every child under the age of 5 be vaccinated. While polio vaccine coverage in Gaza was estimated to be 99 per cent in 2022, it dipped below 90 per cent by the beginning of 2024.
The reappearance of polio there has prompted an urgent international effort to vaccinate children in Gaza which, until now, has been an impossibility due to the war. But recently, Israel succumbed to international pressure to pause its attacks on Gaza long enough to vaccinate the youngest children before continuing the assault in which, in the most tragic of ironies, who knows how many children will perish.
In 2022, Afghanistan and Pakistan were the two outliers in the global eradication of polio. The Taliban had prohibited door-to-door polio vaccination in 2018. Three-quarters of the population lived in rural areas without access to basic healthcare and vaccination services. The COVID-19 pandemic itself caused a break in the polio vaccination program. Just across the border, in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, the news agency Al Jazeera reported that, “misinformation linked to religious beliefs . . . disinformation, agenda-driven campaigns, myths, community boycotts and mistrust in the government have also been factors behind [vaccination] refusals.”
Without democratic governance worthy of public confidence, social order cannot be maintained. Without a functioning healthcare system, the spread of disease cannot be prevented. These are among the characteristics of a failing state of which the dysfunctional Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is another example. Last month, WHO identified the outbreak of mpox in the DRC as a public health emergency of international concern, as the disease spreads across central Africa and cases are already confirmed outside the continent.
In Canada, we should be grateful for the generations of effort that have gone into building our cherished healthcare system, and we are right to fight to protect and improve it, as continues to be the case here in the Pontiac. We must recognize that our ability to do so relies heavily on our system of governance, founded on democratic principles of transparency, accountability and on the existence of a free press where voices of dissent have every right to argue their case.
By the same token, we should be wary of politicians who seek to advance their own careers by stoking fears over the loss of freedoms and trying to discredit the very institutions that prevent our society from descending into chaos and catastrophe.
There are people throughout the world who struggle for survival in the absence of the many freedoms we take for granted, whose greatest hope would be for health authorities as capable as ours, and who would trade their fate with ours in a heartbeat.
Charles Dickson
