“The U.N. has launched the largest-ever polio vaccination campaign in the Middle East, aiming to immunize more than 20 million children in seven countries amid an outbreak of the crippling virus in war-torn Syria, officials said on Friday,” Agence France-Presse reports (11/8). “The mass vaccination against polio, which can spread rapidly among children, is already under way in the Middle East a week after the region declared a polio emergency, the [WHO] and [UNICEF] said,” Reuters adds (Nebehay/Kelland, 11/8). The outbreak “represents a public health threat to Europe, experts have warned for the first time,” the Independent reports (Cooper, 11/8). In related news, GlobalPost speaks with experts from the WHO and UNICEF about polio and the outbreak in Syria (Besant, 11/7).

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