Polio returns to the US after decline in vaccine uptake
“Polio is spreading in Rockland county. Our new generation is in danger,” warns a poster pasted to the wall of a supermarket in Pearl River, a commuter town on the fringes of suburban New York.
It records the re-emergence of the disease as a public health threat, four decades after US authorities had eliminated its transmission with a nationwide childhood vaccination scheme. Last month, New York state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, had to declare a disaster emergency after the virus was detected in several counties’ wastewater, prompting fears that there could be thousands of asymptomatic infections.
It followed the diagnosis, in July, of the first polio case in the US since 2013 in an unvaccinated man in his twenties, who went to doctors in Rockland with his legs partly paralysed. His infection has since been linked via genetic sequencing with the detection of vaccine-derived polio (VDP) in wastewater in London and several infected children in Israel, although he did not travel abroad during the incubation period.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Jamie Smyth
