WASHINGTON — The polio virus was present in the sewage of a New York City suburb a month before health officials announced a confirmed case of the disease last month, state health officials said Monday , and asked residents to make sure they had been vaccinated.
The discovery of the disease from sewage samples collected in June means the virus was present in the community before the Rockland County adult’s diagnosis was made public on July 21.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an emailed statement that the presence of the virus in the wastewater indicates that there may be more people in the community shedding the virus in the their feces
However, the CDC added that no new cases have been identified and that it is still unclear whether the virus is actively spreading in New York or elsewhere in the United States.
Laboratory tests also confirmed that the strain in the case is genetically linked to an encounter in Israel, although that did not mean the patient had traveled to Israel, the officials added. The CDC said genetic sequencing also linked it to samples of the highly contagious and life-threatening virus in the UK.
The patient had started showing symptoms in June, when local officials asked doctors to be on the lookout for cases, according to the New York Times.
“Given how quickly polio can spread, now is the time for all adults, parents and guardians to vaccinate themselves and their children as soon as possible,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, State Health Commissioner.
There is no cure for polio, which can cause irreversible paralysis in some cases, but it can be prevented with a vaccine that became available in 1955.
New York officials have said they are opening vaccine clinics to help unvaccinated residents get vaccinated. Inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) is the only polio vaccine given in the United States since 2000, according to the CDC. It is given by injection in the leg or arm, depending on the age of the patient.
Polio is often asymptomatic, and people can spread the virus even when they don’t look sick. But it can produce mild, flu-like symptoms that can take up to 30 days to appear, officials said.
It can affect any age, but the majority of those affected are children three years of age or younger.
The New York State Department of Health told Reuters that, based on the available evidence, it could not conclude with certainty whether the positive polio samples came from the case identified in Rockland County.
“Certainly, when samples like these are identified, it raises concerns about the potential for community spread, so it’s very important that anyone who isn’t vaccinated, especially in the Rockland County area, get vaccinated as soon as possible is possible,” he added. the department said.
The polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in the 1950s was heralded as a scientific breakthrough in dealing with the worldwide scourge, now largely eradicated across the country. The United States has not seen a case of domestically generated polio since 1979, although cases were found in 1993 and 2013.