The United Kingdom Health Security Agency said Wednesday that children ages 1 to 9 in and around London should be vaccinated against polio after the discovery of the poliovirus in sewage in north and east London.
"No cases of polio have been reported and for the majority of the population, who are fully vaccinated, the risk is low," the agency’s Consultant Epidemiologist Vanessa Saliba said in a press release Wednesday. "But we know the areas in London where the poliovirus is being transmitted have some of the lowest vaccination rates.
"This is why the virus is spreading in these communities and puts those residents not fully vaccinated at greater risk."
While the agency says the risk for an outbreak of the disease as "low" because of the overall high vaccination rate, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization is recommending "a targeted inactivated polio vaccine booster dose" for all children ages 1 to 9 in all the city's boroughs.
"Polio is a serious infection that can cause paralysis, but nationally the overall risk is considered low because most people are protected by vaccination," Saliba said. "The last case of polio in the U.K. was in 1984, but decades ago before we introduced the polio vaccination program, around 8,000 people would develop paralysis every year."
According to the agency, 116 virus samples were detected in 19 sewage samples collected in London between Feb. 8 and July 5, but only a few had mutated to a more dangerous form.
The findings, however, suggest that the virus is spreading around those locations, but it's not clear if the virus "established itself" in these locations, or was transmitted from neighboring boroughs.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported one case in the United States in July from an unvaccinated individual in Rockland County, New York.
At its worst, the virus can attack the spinal cord and cause paralysis, while milder forms cause flu-like symptoms and vanish in a few days, according to the CDC.
Outbreaks of the disease were frequent in the 1940s and 1950s with as many as 15,000 people paralyzed in that latter decade.
Vaccines developed in the mid-1950s and early 1963, including an oral dose, dropped the number of paralyzed victims to just 100 in the 1960s and 10 during the 1970s, with no cases reported since 1979, according to the CDC.
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