EDITORIAL: Polio’s tiny, but troubling, return

Published 1:00 pm Monday, August 29, 2022

Polio, the specter that haunted America during the first half of the 20th century, leaving parents frightened that their children would be killed or paralyzed for life, can seem as relevant today as manual typewriters or black-and-white TV sets.

And for more than three decades, the viral disease has been relegated to history.

Polio hasn’t spread widely in the U.S. since 1979. And the federal government declared the disease eradicated from the U.S. in 1994.

The reason is simple — vaccination.

Vaccines have all but eliminated polio, along with other previously widespread diseases that mainly afflicted children, such as measles, mumps, diphtheria and whooping cough.

Yet earlier this month a young adult who is not vaccinated against polio and lives in Rockland County, New York, north of New York City, contracted the virus and was paralyzed. More troubling, the virus was found in sewage samples in a few New York counties, as well as in New York City.

Vaccination rates remain high in most of the country, fortunately. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about 93% of 2-year-olds have had at least three doses of polio vaccine (federal officials recommend four doses, although some states require only three for students attending school).

But the CDC also notes, in a report on the recent New York state polio case, that vaccination rates have dipped during the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to disruptions in some vaccination programs.

There’s another potential concern — that the politicization of COVID-19 vaccines will convince some people to eschew polio and other vaccines whose effectiveness and safety are indisputable based on voluminous data over many decades.

According to the New York State Immunization Information System, vaccination rates among children 2 and younger in Rockland County was 60.3% as of August 2022. In some communities, the rate was as low as 37.3%. That puts a significant number of children at risk of contracting a preventable disease.

New York officials believe polio arrived in the state by way of a person infected with a strain of the virus linked to samples found in wastewater in Israel and the United Kingdom. That person either had few or no symptoms — which is the case with most people who are infected with the polio virus — and then spread it to others, including the person who, due to the paralysis, became the first known confirmed case in the state.

The reappearance of polio, even in a very limited sense as is the case in New York, doesn’t mean the disease is going to become widespread again. But the episode should be a valuable reminder to Americans of how vital vaccination is, and how much inoculations have done to spare both children and adults from terrible, and potentially fatal, infections.

Sadly, someone’s life was irrevocably changed in the process.

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor