Nearly 40 kids infected with polio in Syria, Iraq: UN

Thirty-eight children have been paralyzed by polio in Syria and Iraq since October last year and there is a high risk that the disease will spread further in the Middle East, the United Nations says.

“It is now even more imperative to reach every child multiple times, and to do whatever we can to vaccinate children we could not reach in previous rounds," said Maria Calivis, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), in a report on Tuesday.

The disease, which broke out in Deir al-Zor, the largest in the eastern part of Syria, has infected 36 people in the crisis-hit country so far. Most of the Syria cases were recorded in Deir al-Zor, but others were in Aleppo, Idlib, Hama, and Hasakah. "Right now we estimate that there are 765,000 children inside Syria who live in areas that are hard to reach. And as long as we don't get full and regular access to these children, the chances of polio spreading further will continue to exist," said Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for UNICEF. The two cases in Iraq are children living around the capital Baghdad. Between December 2013 and June, a polio vaccination campaign was launched in seven countries of the Middle East, which reached a record 25 million children, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization. A second phase of the campaign is planned to take place from August.