FRIDAY, July 22, 2022 (HealthDay News) — New York health officials said Thursday that the first U.S. case of polio in nearly a decade has been confirmed in an unvaccinated young adult in Rockland County.
“Based on what we know about this case, and polio in general, the [New York] The Department of Health strongly recommends that unvaccinated individuals be vaccinated or boosted with the FDA-approved IPV polio vaccine as soon as possible,” state Health Commissioner Mary Bassett, MD, said in a statement. “The vaccine polio is safe and effective, protecting against this potentially debilitating disease and has been part of the backbone of required routine childhood immunizations recommended by health officials and public health agencies across the country.”
In the Rockland County case, the patient developed paralysis, but is no longer contagious. The person likely contracted the disease from someone who had received a type of live polio vaccine given only in other countries (the United States uses an inactivated type of vaccine that cannot cause polio), the Associated Press reported. The person had not recently traveled outside the country, health officials said.
Investigators are now working to determine specifically how the infection occurred and whether others were exposed, while health officials have scheduled polio vaccination clinics for Friday and Monday in New York.
Rockland County, a northern suburb of New York City, is known for past cases of vaccine resistance and had a measles outbreak that infected 312 people between 2018 and 2019, according to the AP.
Polio was declared eliminated in the United States in 1979. Vaccines have been available since 1955, with national vaccination campaigns gradually reducing cases to 100 in the 1960s and less than 10 in the 1990s. 1970, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. .
Associated press article