Doctor Issues Warning on Risk of Polio in New York

Newsweek - Dec 30, 2023

Article Summary:

“Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center and a Fox News contributor, issued a warning on Friday about the rising risk of polio in New York amid the migrant crisis.

In 2022, the first case of polio in New York since 1990 had been detected. According to the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the polio virus was not only found in an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County, but was also found in several wastewater samples from communities near the adult's residence. In the late 1940s, more than 35,000 people were paralyzed from polio in the U.S. every year, according to the CDC. But the vaccine in 1955 dramatically reduced the spread of the disease to less than 100 cases annually by the 1960s. The virus had also been eliminated from the U.S. by 1979, though sporadic cases that originated abroad have been identified over the years.

Polio symptoms include fatigue, fever, headache, stiffness, muscle pain and vomiting. It can take up to 30 days for symptoms to show. It can also lead to permanent paralysis of the arms and legs, and even death in some cases.

Since the influx of migrants coming into the U.S. over the past year, public health concerns have increased as unvaccinated migrants have been fueling a rise in diseases such as chickenpox.

"We see chickenpox emerge because people are under vaccinated during the pandemic, but when I talk to the top vaccine expert in the country, Paul Offit from Penn, I ask what keeps him up at night. I thought he was going to say a bioengineered virus, he said ‘measles. Measles because 22 million children in the world are not vaccinated fully against measles last year,’ he said.”

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