Polio outbreak in New York, London, and Jerusalem: For the first time in decades, the dreaded disease of polio is spreading in areas of London, Jerusalem, and New York urging catch-up vaccination campaigns in the countries.
The Asymptomatic Disease
Source: Histopathology-India.net
Polio, or poliomyelitis, is an asymptomatic disease.
The life-threatening illness is caused due to poliovirus. It spreads from person to person and can be spread through contaminated water, feces, or an infected person’s cough or sneeze.
This contagious disease may affect the spinal cord leading to paralysis.
In some cases, it shows symptoms like fever and vomiting.
According to statistics, approximately one in 200 cases of polio results in irreversible paralysis, out of which around 10% of the patients die.
While there is no cure for the dreaded disease, a vaccine invented in the 1950s proved to be a breath of relief.
The vaccine makes polio preventable, and this led to the vanishing of the disease almost entirely from the globe.
Poliovirus comes in two main forms.
While most cases are the wild-type, some cases can also sprout even after being vaccinated. The latter one is called vaccine-derived polio.
This second form of polio is recently detected in London’s wastewater.
Moreover, some cases have also been found in New York, with one of them leading to paralysis.
As per the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), genetically similar cases have been found in Jerusalem, Israel, and scientists are attempting to understand the link.
Vaccine-derived polio is a rare threat in many countries, however, there were around 415 cases found in Nigeria in 2021. This type of polio stems from the use of an oral polio vaccine that has weakened live virus.
Once children are vaccinated, they shed the virus in their feces for a couple of weeks.
This leads to the spread of the virus in most under-vaccinated communities, taking the form of its harmful version from a weakened source.
Countries like Britain and the United States no longer use this dangerous oral vaccine to stop the outbreak, but they still aren’t completely safe from the attack.
How?
Well, there are still some countries that use this live-vaccination method, which can turn into the reason for global spread, especially after travel restrictions have been lifted post the pandemic.
Reason Behind The Sudden Outbreak
Source: Jagran
As per Derek Ehrhardt, global polio leader at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it is clear that both vaccine-derived and wild polio cases stem from under-vaccinated communities.
Many countries across the globe fight with the issue of vaccine hesitancy, and the COVID 19 outbreak changed the routine immunization scenario for the worse.
In the year 2020, the cases were around three times as many as the previous year.
While efforts are being made to revive routine immunization and polio vaccination campaigns, the year 2022 has witnessed approximately 177 cases till now.
The sudden wastewater detections are an alarming caution for parents. Scientists and epidemiologists all around the globe urge parents to get their children vaccinated.