Brussels, 17/03/2014 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission is providing an additional €1 million to Unicef to enable this partner organisation to ensure that a vaccination campaign against polio will continue inside Syria. The news was announced on Friday 14 March during the visit to Syria of European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response Kristalina Georgieva. The funding should enable 2.5 million children under the age of five to be inoculated against polio in hard-to-reach areas as well as those who have been forced to move repeatedly because of the fighting.
“Syrians have experienced unbelievable hardship and deprivation over the past three years of this terrible conflict. The outbreak of polio last year was an additional blow, putting millions of children at risk (…). I hope that this additional funding will prolong the outreach of the polio vaccination campaign sufficiently”, said Georgieva.
It is estimated that there are currently 700,000 children under the age of five living in hard-to-reach areas to which there has been little or no access for large-scale immunisation activities for the last two years. Many children (especially those under two years of age) in these areas have been covered by only one or two campaign rounds. The resurgence of poliomyletis in Syria for the first time since 1999, led the WHO and Unicef to conduct vaccination campaigns targeting 23 million children under the age of five with a budget of $39 million. These campaigns are ongoing in the region (Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Turkey). (AN)