NY reports first US case of polio since 2013

New York state health officials on Thursday reported an unvaccinated young adult contracted polio, the first such case in the United States in nearly a decade.

The person is no longer able to transmit the virus, officials said, but investigators are investigating how the infection occurred and whether other people may have been exposed to the virus.

Health officials confirmed that the infection was transmitted from someone who received the oral polio vaccine, which contains a mild virus strain that is still able to replicate, which means people who receive it can spread the virus to others.

The oral polio vaccine hasn’t been administered in the US since 2000. Officials believe the virus may have originated outside the United States, where the oral vaccine is still administered.

The US uses an inactive polio vaccine that is administered as a shot in the leg or arm. This vaccine uses a non-replicating virus strain so people who receive it can’t spread the virus.

Officials said the patient, whose sex was not released, lives in Rockland County, a northern suburb of New York City. The person developed symptoms a month ago and had developed paralysis. The patient was hospitalized, but is no longer able to transmit the virus, officials said.

“I want to stress that this individual is no longer contagious,” said Ed Day, the Rockland County executive, in a news conference Thursday afternoon. “Our efforts now are focused on two issues: vaccinations and figuring out if anyone else has been impacted by this disease.”

Dr Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, Rockland County’s health commissioner, said at the news conference that the county health department was notified on Monday about the confirmed case.

“We are now surveying the family and close contacts of this individual to assess the risk to the community,” Ruppert said.

Polio is highly contagious and often begins with symptoms similar to the flu such as fatigue, fever, headache, muscle pain, vomiting and stiffness. Symptoms can take as long as 30 days to develop, which means people who haven’t fallen ill yet can still spread the virus to others. In rare cases, polio can cause paralysis and death.

Polio was once one of the nation’s most feared diseases, with annual outbreaks causing thousands of cases of paralysis, many of them in children.

The virus caused widespread fear in the 1940s before vaccines were available, with more than 35,000 people becoming disabled from polio every year, many of them children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At the time, many parents were afraid to let their children play outside during the summer when transmission peaked.

Vaccines became available starting in 1955, and a nationwide vaccination campaign cut the annual number of cases to less than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s, according to the CDC. The US became polio free by 1979. Rarely, travelers with polio have brought infections into the US, with the last such case in 2013.

Most Americans are vaccinated against polio, and the CDC recommends that all children receive the polio vaccine. New York state requires that all children receive the shot before they start school.