Polio Virus Found in New York Wastewater Amid Mayor Eric Adams' State of Emergency Declaration Over Monkeypox Outbreak

The polio virus was found in wastewater in a New York City suburb a month before health officials there identified a case of the disease last month, state health officials said on Monday, encouraging people to ensure they had been vaccinated.

The fact that the sickness was discovered in wastewater samples gathered in June indicates that the virus was circulating in the community before the Rockland County adult's diagnosis was made public on July 21.

New York Health Officials Monitor Wastewater For Polio

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the presence of the virus in wastewater suggests that more persons in the community are shedding the virus in their feces.

However, the CDC said that no new cases have been detected, and it is unclear if the virus is actively spreading in New York or elsewhere in the United States.

Laboratory testing also proved the strain in the case is genetically connected to one identified in Israel; however, officials cautioned that this did not imply the patient had flown to Israel. According to the CDC, genetic sequencing linked it to samples of the highly infectious and potentially fatal virus in the United Kingdom.

The patient's symptoms began in June when local officials encouraged doctors to be on the lookout for instances. Polio, which can cause irreversible paralysis in rare cases, has no treatment, but it can be avoided using a vaccine developed in 1955, Reuters reported.

According to experts, America's first polio patient in a decade was infected with the same type of virus that was discovered earlier this year in Jerusalem and London. Testing confirmed that the Jewish man in his twenties from Rockland County, New York, who was crippled by the disease, had contracted type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV), similar to that found in wastewater in other countries.

Testing at Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) labs indicated that the New York patient had contracted the same strain discovered this year. Some nations, but not the United States, continue to employ an oral poliovirus vaccination. This method employs a live virus that, in rare situations, can be passed on to others when recipients excrete it. After many infections, it may change into the more lethal ancestral types.

The American polio sufferer exposed last month is a young Jewish guy who did not receive the three-dose polio vaccination. He has now been released from the hospital and moved into the home he shares with his wife and parents.

However, the infection's paralysis has left him unable to move. It was unclear how he contracted the illness, but the man had not recently been overseas, implying he contracted it from another unvaccinated person, as per Daily Mail.

New York Declares State of Emergency

Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams announced a state of emergency over the monkeypox outbreak on Monday, allowing him to suspend municipal laws and implement new restrictions to better handle the outbreak.

The mayor's emergency executive order follows the city's health department's declaration of a public health emergency for monkeypox on Saturday. Under that city declaration, Ashwin Vasan, the city's health commissioner, has the authority to issue orders altering the city's health code to prevent the spread of the virus.

On Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a statewide disaster emergency, putting pressure on the federal government to deploy more vaccinations to the state. Hochul's decision allowed Adams to declare a local emergency.

When COVID-19 initially spread across the city, former Mayor Bill de Blasio utilized the same approach to enhance his mayoral authority. Similar emergency declarations were issued during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing officials to suspend some contract-procurement procedures, demand electronic reporting of Covid-related deaths, and enforce immunization or testing for workers in public healthcare facilities.

Though monkeypox is a distinct hazard, now that Adams and the health department have declared a state of emergency, the city might take comparable steps, such as demanding data gathering regarding hospitalization and vaccine.

As of Monday, New York City had recorded 1,472 instances of monkeypox, with the majority of cases involving homosexual, bisexual, and other males who have sex with men. Cases of the virus, which may afflict anybody, continue to climb throughout the city and across the country, and true case numbers are likely far higher than those recorded owing to a lack of diagnosis, according to Politico.