THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
A 10-month-old boy in the Gaza Strip was recently paralyzed by poliovirus—the first such case in the region this century. Israel and Hamas have agreed to a limited ceasefire to allow 640,000 children in the enclave to be vaccinated against the virus. We asked a virologist to explain how the virus emerged in the region after all this time, and how it will be dealt with.
The Conversation: Given that polio was all but eradicated in this region of the world,