“We’re dealing with the trifecta. Covid is still very much here. Polio, we have identified polio in our wastewater. And we’re still dealing with the monkeypox crisis,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Friday on CNN’s New Day. “We address threats as they come to us, and we stand ready to deal with them and with the assistance of Washington, DC.”
In a statement about the sewage finding, New York City officials stressed the urgent need for polio immunizations, especially for those in the greater New York metro area.
Most people in the US are protected from polio thanks to vaccination. The primary series of three vaccines provides 99% protection. However, unvaccinated and undervaccinated people are vulnerable.
“For every case of paralytic polio identified, hundreds more may go undetected,” said state Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett. “Finding Poliovirus in New York City Sewage Samples Alarming, But Not Surprising.”
The virus is most commonly spread through stool and, less commonly, when a person infected with polio sneezes or coughs. About 90 percent of people with polio do not have any visible symptoms, according to the World Health Organization. Some have flu-like symptoms such as sore throat, fever, fatigue and nausea. About 1 in 25 people will get viral meningitis, an infection of the lining of the spinal cord and/or brain, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 1 in 200 people will become paralyzed and will not be able to move parts of their body, or will feel some kind of weakness in their arms, legs, or both. Even children who fully recover from the initial illness may develop muscle pain and weakness years later.
Paralysis can lead to permanent disability and death because it can affect the muscles used for breathing.
City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan said that with polio circulating in our communities, “there’s simply nothing more important than vaccinating our children to protect them from this virus, and if you’re an unvaccinated or under-vaccinated adult , please choose now get the vaccine.”
CDC investigates polio in New York
The sewage finding follows the identification of a case of paralytic polio in a Rockland County, New York, resident on July 21 and the detection in May, June and July sewage samples from Rockland and Orange counties.
A CDC official told CNN this week that the case in Rockland County was “just the tip of the iceberg” and suggested there “must be several hundred cases circulating in the community.”
The agency sent a team of disease detectives to Rockland County last week to investigate the case and help with vaccination. A public health leader who met with the team told CNN that investigators are “pretty nervous” that polio “could get out of control very quickly and we have a crisis on our hands.”
Before the invention of the vaccine, polio was considered “one of the most feared diseases in the United States,” according to the CDC. In the 1940s, it disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the United States. After the polio vaccine became available in 1955, the number of cases decreased significantly.
The last case in the US was reported nearly a decade ago.
Officials say routine vaccine coverage among New York City children has declined since 2019, noting that only 86.2 percent of New York City children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years have received three doses of the polio vaccine , which means that nearly 14% are not fully protected. Some children missed vaccination sessions due to the pandemic. Others live in small groups in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, including in Rockland County, who have decided not to vaccinate their children. Others in Rockland’s religious Jewish community have made efforts to work with public health officials to educate those who refuse to vaccinate their children. In some neighborhoods of New York, the vaccination rate is significantly lower than in the rest of the city. In Williamsburg, for example, only 56.3% of children are vaccinated. In Battery Park City, it’s 58%. In Bedford-Stuyvesant/Ocean Hill/Brownsville, it’s 58.4%. On a national scale, the percentage of vaccinated children is close to 93%.
“The risk to New Yorkers is real, but the protection is so simple: Get vaccinated against polio,” said Vasan, the city’s health commissioner. “Polio is completely preventable and its re-emergence should be a call to action for us all.”
CNN’s Elisabeth Cohen, Daniel Herrmann and John Bonifield contributed to this report.
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