A SECOND OPINION
This space is for our physician members to speak their minds freely on both medical or non-medical issues of the day and respond to the opinions of others . The GLMS Editorial Board reserves the right to choose what will be published . Please note that the views expressed in A Second Opinion or any other article in this publication are not those of the Greater Louisville Medical Society or Louisville Medicine .
First of all , piling on criticism of the CDC seems unfair given the hostility and disrespect that many U . S . public health authorities have faced since the onset of COVID-19 isolation and prevention recommendations . Multiple states have taken action to punish their own health departments for simply protecting the citizenry by recommending strict isolation and preventive measures against the coronavirus . Some states have reacted by removing the power of declaring quarantine for those who represent an active infectious threat . The return of polio in New York City illustrates the heartbreaking danger children and unvaccinated adults will face in a world where millions of children are behind in getting all core vaccines : not just in families of vaccine refusers , but because of pandemic school closures ( schools keep track thus helping with enforcement ), the perceived risks of entering a doctor ’ s office , and the loss of parents to Covid , trauma and other ailments that hit the poorest communities worst of all .
Besides the poorest communities , the highest numbers of under- or unvaccinated children in Brooklyn come from predominantly Hasidic neighborhoods . Their leaders have taken a stand against all vaccinations in recent years , and by tradition have insisted on continuing large community religious celebrations , despite Covid . The 2018 outbreak of measles occurring in Rockland County , New Jersey – where the recent index wastewater polio sample surfaced – was in a Hasidic group , just as with the Brooklyn neighborhoods who have repeatedly protested vaccines . Covid caused severe death
Monkeying Around
by MARY BARRY , MD tolls in these households . However , with extensive public health outreach and mandatory school closures until measles vaccination rates reached 95 %, the measles epidemic was eventually contained , although some children did not return to school for months .
NYC officials are gearing up similar efforts to contain the spread of polio . The lowest vaccination rates for polio are in Rockland and Brooklyn : Williamsburg , Battery Park City and Bed-Stuy , the same scenario as for measles and Covid .
Two terrifying things about polio : first , the vast majority of those infected have minor symptoms or none , so that unsuspecting patients circulate freely in their normal lives . Second , active infection can derive from the older live / attenuated oral vaccine ( OPV ) used here only till the year 2000 ( since then , here in the U . S . we use IPV , the inactivated type ). Genetic sequencing from the first NYC case , the patient who did develop paralysis , shows that it is a vaccine-derivative case . That means the virus took the extremely rare route of replicating in an immune compromised person and then reverting back to a paralytic mutant of the poliovirus . This hardly ever happens : between 2000 and 2017 , over 10 billion doses of oral polio vaccine have been given to over 3 billion kids , and under 760 cases of OPV-derived infections resulted . Even so , in 2016 the type of OPV was changed to bivalent from trivalent , since most all poorer countries still use OPV , to try to make that 760 a zero .
To me and others , the recent arrival of monkeypox to the U . S . echoed that of Covid . Prior to May 2022 , the last case here was November 16 , 2021 , in a Maryland resident who recently returned
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