Going Backwards on Polio
By Albert B. Kelly
These days the news comes at us as if it’s coming through a firehose- meaning there’s a huge volume of it and with extreme pressure- so you can be forgiven if you missed the latest news that the polio virus is alive and well in this country. So much so that New York State declared a state of emergency on the heels of finding the polio virus in waste water in four counties: Orange, Sullivan, Rockland, and Nassau.
That’s news that should scare us but it’s also news that should cause us some shame. I say that because polio (aka poliomyelitis) had been eradicated in this country. Polio is extremely contagious and at its worst, the virus causes paralysis, meaning you can’t move, which in turn makes it hard to breathe. It can result in death.
If you were born in the early 1950s or prior, you likely remember the fear that existed over the possibility of contracting polio. In 1952 for example, approximately 58,000 people contracted polio in the U.S. and some 3,000 people died from the disease. Most were children.
We largely forgot about polio because in the mid-1950s a vaccine invented by Dr. Jonas Salk was rolled out to combat the disease. The rollout wasn’t without problems- a defective vaccine from a California lab resulted in 200 children having paralysis and there were 10 deaths. Regardless, polio was so frightening that Salk was hailed as hero. Since then, the vaccine meant a steady decline in cases until we ultimately reached a point in this country where polio was a nonfactor. This was no small thing considering that there is no cure for polio.
But now polio is back and it’s not because the virus mutated into something that evaded the vaccine, but because far too many people bought into the idea that all vaccines are dangerous and are to be avoided. Just as we’re confronted with the fact that some 1,074,690 Americans are dead from Covid-19, many of them because they refused to be vaccinated, we are now faced with the reemergence of polio for the same reason.
To a list that includes Covid, Hepatitis, influenza, and Monkey pox, we can now add back polio. It’s not yet rampant and the hope is that it never will be but if enough people remain unvaccinated, its spread could become significant. For the record, people get polio by swallowing the virus, something that can easily happen if you don’t wash your hands after going to the bathroom as polio is in stool.
While the state of emergency is in New York, we would do well to remember that we’re not that far away from the four counties where they found the virus circulating. Unlike the past, we have early surveillance on our side so instead of waiting for a certain number of cases to emerge, we can test waste water and pick up the presence of the virus before large numbers of people get sick.
But it is frustrating to think that a certain number of children today are once again vulnerable to a disease we basically eradicated 30 years ago not because the virus mutated and changed, but because we mutated and changed and because some households are ill-informed or misled about the risks and where they lay.
The bottom line is that parents need to get their children vaccinated and if you are an adult and you’ve never been vaccinated now is the time to get vaccinated for polio. Children generally get the vaccine over a period of time beginning at 2 months, then at 4 months, followed by a third round at 6 to 18 months and then finally between ages 4 to 6 years.
For adults that have not been vaccinated, the schedule is two doses separated by a couple of months and then a third dose some six to twelve months later.
My sense is that we’re standing on the edge of cliff when it comes to viruses and we’re about to fall hard. Not because of polio alone, but because we’ve politicized basic public health. We all know the impact of Covid-19 since we’ve been living with it for nearly 3 years. But now there’s Monkey pox. Anyone see that one coming? We’re about to head into flu season and in case we haven’t noticed, we’re not done with Covid-19 and whatever new variants and mutations await us.