Brittany Strickland was "scared to death" when she learned this summer that the United States had recorded its first case of poliomyelitis in nearly ten years, a young New Yorker struck with paralysis.

" It's frightening.

We didn't think it would happen here, ”says this 33-year-old woman in Pomona, a town in the New York county of Rockland, 50 km north of Manhattan.

"My mother was opposed to vaccines and I realized that as a child, I had not been vaccinated against polio", confides this designer who has just received her first dose against the polio virus, which had practically disappeared .

In mid-August, New York health authorities warned that the poliomyelitis virus (a highly contagious disease transmitted through stools, secretions from the nose and throat or by drinking contaminated water) had been detected in Wastewater.

A “worrying but not surprising” discovery, according to the authorities, who believe that “the virus is probably circulating locally” and that New Yorkers not yet vaccinated must do so as soon as possible.

Better vaccinate children

Because in mid-July, the very first proven case of polio was recorded in Rockland County, the very first in the United States since 2013. For New York City, 86% of children aged six months to five years received three doses of the vaccine, which means that 14% are not fully protected.

In Rockland County, only 60 percent of two-year-olds are vaccinated, compared to 79 percent in New York state as a whole and 92 percent nationwide, according to health officials.

"Concerned", the Federal Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) dispatched experts to New York State this summer to better screen and vaccinate.

Because the disease can have “devastating and irreversible consequences”.

A disease almost eradicated

Polio, which mainly strikes the very young and causes paralysis, has practically been eradicated in the world, with the exception of poor countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the United States, whose President Franklin Roosevelt contracted the disease in 1921 at the age of 39, the number of contaminations declined at the end of the 1950s (15,000 cases of paralysis per year at the time), thanks to a first vaccine. .

The last natural infection in the country dates from 1979.

But health authorities know that in rare cases (2% to 4% out of a million vaccinated children), unvaccinated people may have been infected by others who had received poliomyelitis vaccine orally.

This vaccine administered by ampoule has been banned in the United States since 2000.

"The tip of the iceberg"

But the World Health Organization revealed in June that a poliovirus variant derived from oral vaccines had been detected in sewage in London.

The analysis of the Rockland case also suggests that the infection of the young New Yorker would come from a person who had been vaccinated orally.

This oral vaccine replicates in the intestine and can be transmitted through waste water containing fecal matter.

Less virulent than the natural virus, this variant can however cause serious symptoms, such as paralysis of the limbs of unvaccinated patients.

And since the Rockland patient has not traveled internationally, New York State officials believe the disease was transmitted locally in the county.

New York University virologist John Dennehy fears Rockland's case is "the tip of the iceberg" when he believed the "virus was on the verge of extinction".

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United States: A case of polio detected for the first time since 2013

  • Health

  • UNITED STATES

  • Poliomyelitis (Polio)

  • Virus

  • Sickness

  • New York