STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — For the first time in almost a decade, a case of polio was confirmed in the United States, as health officials in Rockland County discovered the case in July in an unvaccinated 20-year-old man.
On Friday, New York City health officials reported that they had detected the polio virus in the local wastewater system.
As the country still deals with coronavirus (COVID-19) variants and an outbreak of monkeypox, the recent findings of polio have health experts concerned.
“The easiest way to get a polio vaccine is via your regular doc[tor] or pediatrician,” Manhattan borough president Mark D. Levine recently tweeted. “The most urgent priority now is to increase vaccination among children.”
According to the New York City Immunization Registry, of the five boroughs, Manhattan contains the highest number of vaccinated residents. Staten Island just beats out Brooklyn with 81.7% of residents vaccinated against polio, as compared to 81.2%.
The vaccination map shared by the Manhattan borough president shows a portion of the South Shore of Staten Island has under 70% of its residents vaccinated against polio.
“If a child in the United States gets polio it’s child abuse,” said professor Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington School of Medicine. “If a family is withholding vaccinating a child for a completely preventable illness, that’s child abuse.”
Polio, short for poliomyelitis, is caused by the poliovirus, an enterovirus that can infect the nervous system. Symptoms can range from those similar to the flu (sore throat, fever and fatigue), to a more severe infection of the spinal cord, causing meningitis and possible paralysis. Polio is highly contagious, especially to the unvaccinated and those with poor sanitation and water safety standards.
From the first documented cases of polio in 1894, until vaccines were developed in the 1950s, polio was one of the most feared childhood diseases. Thousands of children were left paralyzed during each outbreak, with the most vulnerable being under five-years-old.
The threat of polio changed dramatically when two vaccines were discovered by Dr. Jonas Salk in 1955 and Dr. Albert Sabin in 1961. Both vaccines are very effective in granting 99-percent immunity to infection. Sabin’s oral vaccine became the more widely adopted of the two for use in the US. Polio cases dropped drastically in the 1960s and 1970s, until the virus was seemingly eradicated throughout the country.
Since community spread of polio was eliminated in U.S. around 1980, all infections have come from other countries that still have the disease. Genetic sequencing shows that the recent case was a vaccine-derived poliovirus strain. This means the virus isn’t from one of the few remaining pockets of endemic wild poliovirus, but rather from one of the many more countries with polio outbreaks that mutated from an oral, live-attenuated vaccine, which is not the vaccine currently used in the United States.
“It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe,” Dr. Jonas Salk said when questioned about the safety of the polio vaccine he developed almost 70 years ago.
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