For the first time since 2013, an American was contaminated by Polio. Not vaccinated, it seems to have been infected with a person returned from abroad with a vaccine containing an attenuated viral strain.
Le Monde with AFP
An unvaccinated young American, the first American case in almost ten years, contracted polio, announced Thursday July 21 the New York State health authorities. Residing in Rockland County, 48 kilometers north of Manhattan, the patient felt the first symptoms about a month ago, and now suffers from partial paralysis. He did not show recently and would therefore have been infected in the United States.
According to a press release, his case indicates “a chain of transmission coming from an individual who received the oral antipoliomyelitic vaccine (VPO)”, a viral vector vaccine that has not been used in the United States since 2000. Someone ‘One could however have received it abroad, before contaminating, with its attenuated viral strain, other non-vaccinated people.
New York health officials have asked doctors to monitor possible new cases and exhorted the residents of the county not being vaccinated to do so. The last known case of Polio in the United States dates from 2013, according to the prevention and combat centers (CDC). A 7 month old child who had just left India to settle in the United States had been diagnosed in San Antonio, Texas.
an almost disappeared disease, which reappears
The World Health Organization had warned last month that a type of poliovirus derived from the oral antipoliomyelitic vaccine – likely, in some rare cases, to lead to contamination in others but not in the vaccinated person – had had been detected in London wastewater samples. This can cause serious illness and paralysis in non -vaccinated people.
Polio, an extremely infectious viral disease that largely affects children under the age of 5, has practically been eradicated in the world. Cases have decreased by 99 % since 1988, when polio was still endemic in 125 countries and 350,000 cases had been identified.
Contamination declined strongly in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States, with the development of a vaccine. The last natural infection that took place in the territory dates from 1979.