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Just as the American people began accepting that the Coronavirus is here to stay and Monkeypox might become problematic going forward, polio has reemerged in New York City thirty years after the last recorded case in Gotham.
According to The Washington Post, health authorities announced on Friday (August 12) that the polio virus was found in the waste water of New York City and though they haven’t revealed where the information was collected from, they say they found six positive samples in June and July.
“The risk to New Yorkers is real but the defense is so simple — get vaccinated against polio,” city Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said in a news release. “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’re an unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated adult, please choose now to get the vaccine. Polio is entirely preventable and its reappearance should be a call to action for all of us.”
For those who aren’t familiar with polio, it can lead to paralysis and even death for people who aren’t vaccinated against the virus.
Before being found in the waste waters of New York City, it was an unvaccinated 20-year-old man from Rockland County in northern New York who was the first to be infected with the virus. Though he’s since been treated at a hospital in New York City, he’s having difficulty walking again. He was the first recorded polio infection in the U.S. in nearly a decade.
“Based on earlier polio outbreaks, New Yorkers should know that for every one case of paralytic polio observed, there may be hundreds of other people infected,” state Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett said in last week’s statement. “Coupled with the latest wastewater findings, the department is treating the single case of polio as just the tip of the iceberg of much greater potential spread.”
While polio isn’t airborne like COVID, it is highly contagious and can be transmitted through droplets from coughs and sneezing and person-to-person contact.
Hopefully this doesn’t become another virus that runs rampant throughout society because this is just getting ridiculous at this point.
Luckily most of us got vaccinated against polio as children against our will (kids don’t agree to getting any shots in general). Everyone else needs to take the proper precautions should this virus begin to get out of control.
Be safe out there, y’all.
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