The first U.S. case of polio in about a decade has been detected in New York state.
How easily is polio transmitted?
Jeebus, the world really is ending (with apologies to the O.P. who explicitly stated that’s not the case.)
It’s very contagious.
Transmission
- Poliovirus is very contagious and spreads through person-to-person contact.
- It lives in an infected person’s throat and intestines.
Poliovirus only infects people. It enters the body through the mouth and spreads through:
- Contact with the feces (poop) of an infected person
- Droplets from a sneeze or cough of an infected person (less common)
You can get infected with poliovirus if:
- You have picked-up minute pieces of feces on your hands, and you touch your mouth.
- You put in your mouth objects like toys that are contaminated with feces.
An infected person may spread the virus to others immediately before and up to 2 weeks after symptoms appear.
- The virus can live in an infected person’s feces for many weeks. It can contaminate food and water in unsanitary conditions.
- People who don’t have symptoms can still pass the virus to others and make them sick.
So, just don’t touch their poop and you’ll be fine, right?
Well…
Everyone brings their cell phones with them to the bathroom. You can only imagine how much of a petri dish their phone screen is. They touch their phone, then they touch a counter or a self-serve kiosk, and…
{ shivers }
{ huddles inside, occasionally peering suspiciously through window }
There was a case here in the UK recently.
Fortunately, there are highly effective polio vaccines that provide lifetime immunogenicity against all three wild type strains of Poliovirus, and unless you are ‘exceptional’ you were vaccinated as a child. Poliovirus has no known animal reservoirs (it can infect several species of Old World monkeys but doesn’t replicate or spread effectively) and so with a public health campaign can be controlled, and in fact prior to backlash from The War on Terror and the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization was well on the way to global eradication of the virus by comprehensive vaccination. Developed nations have stopped vaccination campaigns because it was effectively eliminated but infection from the partially deactivated oral vaccine is a known issue (still used because of ease of delivery) and that strain is not particularly virulent, so this is an easily controlled pathogen.
There are plenty of things to be worried about but a resurgent polio pandemic should be vanishing low on the list.
Stranger
When you add in that polio is just DDT poisoning cause by the Nazis (that control our government after we brought them into the country with Operation Paperclip) plan of eugenic population control it all makes sense.
Not something I believe but a collection of ‘’‘‘facts’’‘’ I have personally seen presented as the Truth normies are too scared to acknowledge.
To expand on this:
Oral polio vaccine (OPV, phased out in the U.S. starting in 1996) continues to be used in some Third World countries because it is more effective and easier to administer than inactivated (injected) polio vaccine (IPV). OPV usage carries a risk of infection of others since the vaccine strain of poliovirus is excreted by recipients and potentially can cause infection if rates of immunization are sufficiently low.
Both the N.Y. case and presumed (but not reported) case in the U.K. involve OPV-strain polio.
More on why OPV is still used.
The real risk here is antivaxers taking advantage of public lack of knowledge on this matter and jeering about how polio vaccination causes polio. Obviously, if it wasn’t for polio vaccination we’d still have millions of new polio cases annually instead of the current handful around the world. As recently as the early 1980s there were 300,00-400,000 cases of paralytic polio every year. Complete eradication through vaccination remains tantalizingly close.
It’s been on the cards for most infectious disease experts for several years now. When Covid appeared, there was a lot of press about it. People haven’t been getting polio vaccines because there’s no need for it, right? But they experts say there is need for it. Smallpox, too.
Checks card
Yeah! Right under Monkey Pox. All I need is Dirty Bomb for a verticle win!
I know one person suffering effects of the disease who was born overseas, not vaccinated, and later infected by contact with a person who had received the oral vaccine. I remember a number of people recovering from polio when I was child. The Sabin vaccine nearly eradicated the disease in the US in the early 60s. Before then it was a common fear, as kids we were warned of ‘polio days’, which just meant warm weather and outdoor activities believed to be associated with the disease.
Polio had also made a comeback in Ukraine, even before the war broke out.
Polio outbreak risk increases in western Ukraine as war ensues -- ScienceDaily.
How many people need to have polio for it to show up in sewage? From the article it seems no particular person(s) were identified.
Until covid, I not only didn’t know they did this, I didn’t know they could do it.
Boy, doctors get to do all the glamourous stuff.
Sabin began testing his attenuated vaccines in humans in 1954. By 1957 there was evidence that the virus that was fed to volunteers was not the same as the virus excreted in the feces.
I know polio is not such a big deal these days for most, but it says it’s still endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Is this a money problem or a can’t get to the people problem?
It’s because as bad as anti-vaxxers are here, they’re way worse there.
I can see where that may put a damper on volunteers. If the Taliban backs this, and they know there is a problem, I’m a bit surprised they didn’t supply security.
The killings were the first since UNICEF and the World Health Organization launched a nationwide polio vaccine campaign in November aimed at reaching over 3 million children, with the backing of the Taliban.
Polio teams were frequently targeted by insurgent groups in Afghanistan until the Taliban’s takeover of the country last year, when the hard-line Islamist group said it wanted to work with the UN to stamp out the disease.
I remember (barely) PSAs about public swimming pools and polio.
I do not remember getting the Salk vaccine but I do remember Sabin, probably because of the sugar cube.
One advantage of the oral vaccine is that it is so contagious that even people who don’t get it directly do so indirectly. If only they could keep it from mutating.
We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms.
Col. Kurtz (Apocalypse Now)
I know I got both. And I also remember my mom getting us signed up to be vaccinated as soon as the vaccine was available.
That scene was my first thought. I may as well include a link.