“There are a number of people in the community who are infected with polio virus. They are shedding the virus,” he said. “Spread is always a possibility because spread will be silent.”
A team of CDC disease detectives traveled last week from its Atlanta headquarters to Rockland County and are “pretty nervous” that polio “could get out of control very quickly and we could have a crisis on our hands,” said a health community. leader who has met with the team.
“Is — what’s the opposite of cautiously optimistic?” said another community leader, a vaccine education specialist who has also met with the CDC team in Rockland County. Both leaders requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. Polio can cause incurable paralysis and death, but most people in the US are protected, thanks to vaccination. Others, however, may be vulnerable to the virus for various reasons. The unvaccinated and unvaccinated are vulnerable, and polio vaccination rates in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County, just north of New York, are about 60%, compared to 93% nationally, by age 2 years. are fully vaccinated. Romero said the CDC is looking at a variety of options to protect people from polio, including offering children in the area an extra shot, as British health authorities in London are now doing, or recommending extra doses to certain groups of adults.
“We’re looking at all aspects of how to deal with it. At this point, we don’t have a definitive answer,” he said.

A “silent killer”

Rockland County’s case of polio is the first identified in the United States in nearly a decade. The virus has also been detected in wastewater in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County. The positive samples were genetically linked to this particular case, but no other cases have been reported in the US. About 3 out of 4 people infected with polio have no symptoms, but are still able to spread the virus to others, according to the CDC. Among the rest, most have symptoms such as a sore throat or headache that could easily be overlooked or confused with other illnesses. Only a relatively small number, about 1 in 200 infected people, become paralyzed. Some of those who are paralyzed die because they cannot breathe. In the late 1940s, polio cases disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the US. A vaccination campaign began in 1955 and cases fell rapidly. Today, a full round of childhood polio vaccinations — four doses between 2 months and 6 years of age — is at least 99 percent effective, according to the CDC. But in recent decades, some small groups have not vaccinated their children against the virus. One of them is within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York, including Rockland County.
Much of the rest of the religious Jewish community in Rockland County has rallied around efforts to educate “outcasts” who refuse to get vaccinated, the community’s health leader said.
“It’s a silent killer, like carbon monoxide, and we don’t know when it’s going to hit us,” he said.

“A press release isn’t going to cut it”

The vaccine trainer said the CDC team was intent on learning the best ways to communicate with members of this community, who tend not to use the Internet and instead get much of their information from the WhatsApp messaging platform as well as community forums. newspapers. This week, Rockland County and local health care providers distributed an infographic in multiple languages, including Yiddish, that announced: “Polio is spreading in Rockland County.”
The Rockland County vaccine trainer said that in meetings with the CDC team, “we talked about the need for messages that resonate, and a press release isn’t going to cut it.” Dr. Mary Leahy, CEO of Rockland County’s largest health care provider, Bon Secours Charity Health System, a member of WMCHealth, has attended meetings with the CDC and said that for people who don’t vaccinate their children to understand the seriousness of polio disease, “I turn to the grandparents and great-grandparents who actually lived through the days of polio in the 40s and 50s.”
This makes sense for Romero.
“I grew up in Mexico. I saw this disease, the complications,” he said. “I went to school with kids who had braces.”
He said many Americans do not recognize the “devastating” effects of “lifelong paralysis” from polio.
“I think most of the American public has never seen a case of polio. People have lost that fear, if you will, of the disease.”
CNN’s Danielle Herman and John Bonifield contributed to this report.