The case was found in Rockland County, which has a surprisingly low polio vaccination rate. Dr. José Romero, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, noted that most people with polio do not have symptoms and therefore may spread the virus without knowing it.
“There are a number of individuals in the community who have been infected with poliovirus. They are shedding the virus,” he said. “Spread is always a possibility because spread will be silent.”
A team of CDC disease detectives traveled last week from the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta to Rockland County, and they are “pretty nervous” that polio “could get out of control very quickly and we could have a crisis in our hands,” said a health community. leader who has met with the team.
“They’re… what’s the opposite of cautiously optimistic?” said another community leader, a vaccine education expert, who has also met with the CDC team in Rockland County. Both leaders requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
Polio can cause incurable paralysis and death, but most people in the US are protected by vaccination. Others, however, may be vulnerable to the virus for various reasons.
Unvaccinated and undervaccinated people are vulnerable, and polio vaccination rates in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County, north of New York City, are about 60%, compared to 93% throughout the country, at 2 years. Immunocompromised people may be vulnerable even if they are fully vaccinated. Romero said the CDC is considering a variety of options to protect people from polio, including giving children in the area an extra shot of the vaccine, as U.K. health officials are now doing in London, or recommend additional doses to certain groups of adults.
“We’re looking into all aspects of how to deal with this. At this point, we don’t have a definitive answer,” he said.
A ‘silent killer’
The Rockland County polio case is the first case identified in the United States in nearly a decade.
The virus has also been detected in wastewater from Rockland County and neighboring Orange County. The positive samples were genetically related to the individual case, but no other cases have been reported in the US. About 3 out of 4 people infected with polio have no symptoms, but are still able to spread the virus to others, according to the CDC. Among the rest, most have symptoms such as a sore throat or headache that can easily be overlooked or confused with other illnesses. Only a relatively small number, about 1 in 200 infected people, become paralyzed. Some of those who are paralyzed die because they cannot breathe. In the late 1940s, polio outbreaks incapacitated an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the US. A vaccination campaign began in 1955 and cases fell rapidly. Today, a full round of childhood polio vaccines (four doses between 2 months and 6 years) is at least 99% effective, according to the CDC. But in recent decades, some small groups have not vaccinated their children against the virus. One of them is within New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, including in Rockland County.
Much of the rest of Rockland County’s Jewish religious community has focused on efforts to educate “outliers” who refuse to vaccinate, the community health leader said.
“This is a silent killer, like carbon monoxide, and we don’t know when it’s going to hit us,” he said.
“A press release won’t cut it”
The vaccine educator said the CDC team has been intent on learning the best ways to communicate with members of this community, who tend not to use the Internet and instead get a lot of information from the messaging platform WhatsApp and community newspapers.
This week, Rockland County and local health care providers distributed an infographic in several languages, including Yiddish, that announced, “Polio is spreading in Rockland County.”
The Rockland County vaccine educator said that in meetings with the CDC team, “we talked about the need for messages that resonate, and a press release isn’t going to cut it.”
Dr. Mary Leahy, CEO of Rockland County’s largest health care provider, Bon Secours Charity Health System, a WMCHealth member, has attended meetings with the CDC and said that to get people who don’t vaccinate the your children against polio understand it. the severity of the disease, “I’m addressing the grandparents and great-grandparents who actually lived through the days of polio in the 1940s and 1950s.”
This makes sense to Romero.
“I grew up in Mexico. I saw this disease, the complications,” he said. “I went to school with kids who wore suspenders.”
He said many Americans don’t recognize the “devastating” effects of polio’s “lifelong paralysis.”
“I think most of the American public has never seen a case of polio. People have lost that fear, if you will, of the disease.”
CNN’s Danielle Herman and John Bonifield contributed to this report.