GENEVA: Polio has broken out among young children in northeast Syria, the World Health Organization confirmed on Tuesday, and could spread inside and outside the country, where civil war has led to falling vaccination rates.

The highly contagious crippling disease, transmitted via contaminated food and water, can spread rapidly among children under five, especially in unsanitary shelters for the displaced in Syria or crowded refugee camps in neighboring countries.

Twenty-two children in Deir El-Zor province bordering Iraq became paralyzed on Oct. 17 and WHO’s regional laboratory in Tunis has isolated the wild polio virus in samples taken from 10 victims. Results on the other 12 are expected within days.

“Out of those 22 being investigated, 10 are now confirmed to be due to polio virus,” Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesman of the WHO polio eradication program, told a news briefing in Geneva.

Most victims are under two years old and are believed never to have been vaccinated or to have received only a single dose of the oral vaccine instead of the three which ensure protection from polio, he said. It is Syria’s first polio outbreak since 1999.

Separately, hackers from a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army claimed Monday they had taken control of US President Barack Obama’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The group, which backs Syria’s government and which has previously hacked accounts of The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and other media organizations, published screen shots which it said backed its claims.

“Thanks to our operation, Twitter now blocks Obama’s dangerous propaganda links,” said a tweet from the Syrian group.

Both accounts appeared to be functioning normally some time after the claim. The White House did not immediately respond to an AFP query on the claim.

A Twitter spokesman said in a tweet that “The @BarackObama Twitter account was not compromised; their link shortener was.”

Meanwhile, a Sunni Arab lawmaker was kidnapped by fighters during clashes with members of his pro-regime tribe in Deir El-Zor, a monitoring group reported Monday.

Ahrar Al-Sham rebel group and jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant abducted MP Mohanna Faisal Al-Fayyad on Sunday evening, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.