Despite a school polio vaccine mandate, childhood immunization against polio has dropped in some communities in recent years.
But the case of a young adult catching polio in Rockland County this summer set off alarm bells among public health officials. Sewage samples collected since May in Rockland County, Orange County and New York City have tested positive for polio, strongly indicating that the virus has been circulating in communities in the metropolitan area for months.
"Even once people started going back to the doctor, because a lot of schools were remote, places were not enforcing vaccine mandates. So you've got this cohort of kids who may still be under-immunized," Ratner said. Two doses of the polio vaccine are at least 90% effective at preventing paralysis from the virus, and three doses are 99% to 100% effective, according to the CDC.Poliovirus — which can cause the disease called poliomyelitis, or polio — is a devastating, highly contagious virus that struck fear into parents' hearts before the vaccines became available in the 1950s. More than 35,000 people in the U.S. became disabled from polio every year on average in the late 1940s.
A successful vaccination campaign dramatically reduced cases of polio paralysis from more than 15,000 annually in the early 1950s to fewer than 10 in the 1970s. Since 1979, not a single case of polio has originated in the U.S. The strain the Rockland County adult caught is linked to a weakened form of the virus used in the oral polio vaccine. The U.S. stopped using this vaccine more than 20 years ago, which means someone who was vaccinated outside the country introduced the virus into the U.S. The New York wastewater samples are genetically linked to positive sewage samples in Israel and the United Kingdom.
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