BAGHDAD, Feb 23: Health workers fanned out across Iraq on Sunday at the start of a UN-sponsored vaccination campaign for four million children, the likely first casualties of a US-led war.

“Four million children are being vaccinated throughout the whole of Iraq during a five-day period starting today” against polio and measles, said Carel de Rooy, the representative in Iraq for the UN Childrens’ Fund (UNICEF).

“What we have been doing is to look at specific risk factors which we have to address now,” said de Rooy, warning of grave deterioration in case of war in a country already facing a “a humanitarian crisis.”

De Rooy, speaking to reporters at the teeming Saddam City slum northeast of Baghdad where more than two million residents live in impoverished conditions, said the country was especially vulnerable because of the existing “crisis that Iraq is living today due to two wars and the sanctions.”

He was referring to the devastating 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf War and the embargo imposed on the country by the United Nations since the invasion of neighbouring Kuwait in 1990.

Sanaa Hassan Abdel Nabi, director of a Saddam City health center, said “children are always the first victims of any war.”

“We have prepared emergency plans for the possibility of war, we have prepared emergency medicines, an emergency room, fuel storage, gas, purified water” at the center, she said.

De Rooy said: “We are also looking at other risks: water supply, if electricity goes down, if there are fuel shortages there could be a risk of an increase of diarrhoea outbreaks and acute respiratory infections.”

He said outbreaks of diseases would be dangerous “especially if it is combined with malnutrition in a country where 23 percent of the children under five are already malnourished,” particularly in densely-populated areas such as Saddam City.

De Rooy said UNICEF has supported the training of 14,000 volunteers and financed the campaign with 500,000 dollars, “most of it coming from the humanitarian branch of the European Union and other donors.”—AFP