RUTHFULLY YOURS

As if Israel doesn’t have enough trouble protecting its civilians from external threats, such as Thursday’s rocket barrage from Lebanon into the northern Galilee. Now it has an internal demon on its hands: polio.

Though no cases of the disease have been reported so far, a strain of the virus that was identified in Egypt in December has been spreading throughout the Israeli sewage system since May. To prevent a resurgence of the disease, the Israeli Health Ministry has launched a country-wide immunization campaign, to go on for the next three months.

And with very good reason.

This is not only because polio afflicted so many Israelis (and others) prior to the breakthroughs of virologists Hilary Koprowski, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, thanks to whom the disease has been virtually eradicated in most of the world. But there was a polio outbreak in Israel in 1988, during which 15 people were paralyzed.

The medical community’s current concern is totally justified, as is the campaign now underway to add drops of the weakened live virus to the injections of the inactivated virus that have been used effectively for many years. Since, according to the Health Ministry, most polio carriers are children up to 10 years old who were injected with the inactivated virus but did not receive the live virus, this is the age group that is being targeted. And it is particularly urgent to inoculate them now, less than two weeks before the start of the school year.

Those who have not received the vaccine, or who are not fully inoculated, can receive immunization by a kind of public osmosis. This “herd immunity,” as it is called, creates protection for the population at large.

Nevertheless, as soon as the campaign was announced, critics went on the warpath. These “concerned citizens” have been making assertions so absurd that they sound political — and one can take an educated guess from which side of the spectrum.

Yes, the anti-immunization lobby went beyond arguing its position in the media and on Facebook to filing a petition with the High Court of Justice to halt all immunization until more proof is provided that it is necessary and safe.

The organization that filed the petition, Izun Hozer (the Association for the Dissemination of Health Education), accused the Health Ministry of causing panic, of endangering the public by putting it at risk of contracting polio and — get this — of violating the rights of minors.

According to the petition, “The children who receive the vaccine are supposed to be a ‘defensive shield’ for the unvaccinated population. Instead of vaccinating those people, the [state] prefers to protect them by means of others — children — without their knowledge or that of their parents.”

On Thursday, the court rejected the petition, basing its decision on expert medical testimony. This is the good news. So is the fact that, as of Thursday evening, the two-drop live vaccine had been administered to more than 300,000 children across the country.

The bad news, if one believes a poll conducted this week by Channel 10, is that 46 percent of Israeli parents have decided not to give their children the drops.

This statistic, which may turn out to be false in the end, prompted Avishai Matiya to write an op-ed in Maariv blaming the Israeli health establishment for the situation.

“Nearly half the public isn’t buying into the scare campaign fueled by various media outlets, with the encouragement of health reporters who have forgotten what their job is: to ask questions, criticize, wonder, be tough and present findings,” Matiya wrote.

Well, Matiya, Izun Hozer and all the parents who are treating this like a political debate might want to consider that, according to the World Health Organization, only five countries in the world still suffer from a serious polio problem: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, where it is endemic; and Somalia and Kenya, where there are isolated cases. Honestly, is there any sane Israeli who thinks this is an illustrious club worth joining?

Protecting our children from a disease that can kill them or maim them for life is just as important as making sure they get to a bomb shelter when missiles start flying.

Only highly educated liberals could think otherwise.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”