A polio case identified in New York last month is “just the tip of the iceberg” and an indication that “there must be several hundred cases circulating in the community,” he told CNN an official from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday (10).
The case was detected in Rockland County, which has a significantly low polio vaccination rate. Researcher José Romero, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said most people with polio have no symptoms and therefore can spread the virus without knowing it.
“There are several individuals in the community who have been infected with poliovirus. They are spreading the virus,” he said. “Scattering is always a possibility because it will be silent.”
A team of CDC disease investigators traveled last week from the agency’s Atlanta headquarters to Rockland County. They are “quite apprehensive” that polio “could get out of control very quickly and we could have a crisis on our hands,” said a community health leader who met with the team.
“They’re — what’s the opposite of cautiously optimistic?” said another community leader, a vaccine education specialist, who also met with CDC staff in Rockland County. Both experts requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
Polio can cause incurable paralysis and death, but most people in the United States are protected, thanks to vaccinations. Others, however, may be vulnerable to the virus for a variety of 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 with 93% worldwide. country. Immunocompromised people can be vulnerable, even if they are fully vaccinated.
Romero said the CDC was considering a range of options to protect people from polio, including giving children in the region an extra dose of the vaccine, as UK health officials are now doing in London, or recommending extra doses for certain adult groups.
“We are looking at 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 identified in the United States in nearly a decade.
The virus has also been detected in sewage in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County. The positive samples were genetically linked to the individual case, but no other US cases were reported.
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 be easily ignored or confused with other illnesses. Only a relatively small number, about 1 in 200 infected people, can experience paralysis. Some patients die because they cannot breathe.
In the late 1940s, polio outbreaks disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the US. A vaccination campaign began in 1955, and cases quickly plummeted. Today, a full round of childhood polio vaccines — four doses between 2 months and 6 years of age — 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 is within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York, including Rockland County.
Much of the rest of the religious Jewish community in Rockland County has joined 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,” she said.
‘A press release will not solve’
The vaccine expert said the CDC team is 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 English and Yiddish that advertised, “Polio is spreading in Rockland County.”
The Rockland County vaccine specialist said that in meetings with CDC staff, “we talk about the need for messages that resonate, and a press release won’t be enough.”
Researcher Mary Leahy, CEO of Rockland County’s largest health care provider, Bon Secours Charity Health System, a member of WMCHealth, attended meetings with the CDC and said that to make sure people who are not vaccinating their children against polio understand the seriousness of the disease, “I turn to the grandparents and great-grandparents who really lived through the polio days in the 40s and 50s”.
This makes sense to Romero.
“I grew up in Mexico. I saw this illness, the complications,” he said. “I went to school with kids who wore braces.”
He said many Americans do not recognize the “devastating” effects of polio’s “lifetime paralysis”.
“I think the majority of the American public has never seen a case of polio. People have lost that fear, so to speak, of the disease.”
*Elizabeth Cohen is a senior medical correspondent for CNN. CNN’s Danielle Herman and John Bonifield contributed to this report.
Source: CNN Brasil
