(Reuters) – A case of poliomyelitis, an incurable viral disease commonly known as polio, has been diagnosed in upstate New York for the first time in almost a decade.
Tests on the affected young adult in a suburb of New York indicated that the highly contagious virus may have originated outside the United States, the New York City Health Department said. “We are now interviewing this individual’s family and close contacts to assess the risk to the community,” said Rockland County Public Health Physician Patricia Schnabel Ruppert. The young man was unvaccinated. How or where he got infected is checked.
Polio is often asymptomatic but can cause flu-like symptoms such as a sore throat, fever, fatigue and nausea. In a small percentage of cases, the virus can enter the nervous system and cause irreversible paralysis. The disease was once the most feared disease in the United States, with waves of infection affecting around 35,000 people annually. In Germany, the virus has been considered eradicated since the nationwide vaccinations in the 1960s. In June, the polio virus was detected in London’s wastewater for the first time since the 1980s.
(Report by Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Susan Heavey,Alistair Bell and Muralikumar Anantharaman, written by Anneli Palmen, edited by Ralf Banser; If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and Economy) or [email protected] (for companies and markets).)
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