Polio Vaccination Campaign in Iraq

The World Health Organization (WHO) undertook a five-day polio vaccination campaign in five displacement camps around Erbil, northern Iraq. Its aim was to vaccinate 4,208 children under the age of five with bivalent oral polio vaccine.

Iraq has not had a case of indigenous wild poliovirus since 2000, however the disease emerged in 2013 in Syria, and in 2014 two imported cases of wild poliovirus were detected in Iraq.

In 2017 there were 74 cases of vaccine-derived polio in Raqqa and Deir Zur, Syria. Children in Mosul and Anbar were deemed to have a high risk of outbreaks because of the continuous movement of armed groups between the cities.