Polio has been detected in New York's sewage, officials say

Virus detection in sewage suggests it is circulating in the city, health department officials said.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Polio epidemics caused regular panics decades ago, until a vaccine was developed and the disease was largely eradicated. Then on Friday, New York City health officials announced they had found the virus in sewage samples, suggesting polio was likely circulating in the city again.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Parents of young children have been found wondering - perhaps for the first time in their lives, and collectively for the first time in generations - how much they should worry about polio.

Anabela Borges, a designer who lives in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, said she has friends whose children were probably not vaccinated. After Friday's announcement, she said she planned to "raise awareness among her friends."

Ms. Borges said she hopes her 7-month-old daughter, Ava, who is old enough to have had three of the four injections recommended for children, is far enough along the diet to be protected. "Polio is really dangerous for babies like her," Ms Borges said as she and her daughter's nanny took Ava for a walk in her stroller.

In New York, the overall polio vaccination rate for children 5 and under is 86%, and most adults in the United States were vaccinated against polio as children. Yet in some city zip codes, less than two-thirds of children 5 and under have received at least three doses, a figure that has health officials concerned.

The state of health department said in a statement that the discovery of the virus underscores "the urgency for every adult and child in New York City to get vaccinated, especially those in the greater New York metropolitan area." .

The announcement came three weeks after a man in Rockland County, New York, north of the city, was diagnosed with a case of polio which left him paralyzed. Authorities now say polio has been circulating in county wastewater since May.

“The risk to New Yorkers is real, but the defense is so simple: get vaccinated against polio,” Dr. Ashwin Vasan, New York's health commissioner, said in a statement. “With polio circulating in our communities, there is simply nothing more essential than vaccinating our children to protect them from this virus, and if you are an unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated adult, please choose now to have yourself vaccinate."

Spreading the virus poses a risk to unvaccinated people, but three doses of the current vaccine provide at least 99% protection against serious disease . Children too young to be fully vaccinated are also vulnerable, as are children whose parents have refused to vaccinate them or delayed their vaccinations.

Health officials fear polio detection in New York City sewage may precede other cases of paralytic polio.

"In the absence of a campaign relatively massive vaccination, I think it's very likely that they 'there will be one or more cases' in the city, said Dr. Jay Varma, epidemiologist and former assistant commissioner of health for the city. p>

Citywide vaccination rates plummeted amid pandemic as pediatrician visits were postponed and vaccine misinformation spread accelerated. Even before Covid arrived, vaccination rates for a range of preventable viruses in some neighborhoods were low enough to worry health officials.