Polio in New York: will it just go away?

Get vaccinated and eradicate polio globally, say public health authorities after reappearance of the paralytic disease in New York.1 But vaccination might not be enough. The inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) being used to fight the outbreak protects against paralysis but has little or no effect on transmission. So, the outbreak “won’t be actively extinguished through IPV use,” says Andrew Brouwer, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. The hope is that poliovirus circulation simply dies out.Will polio die out on its own? At times, global eradication of polio has been tantalisingly close. The wild virus had been cornered in Afghanistan and Pakistan, shrinking towards annihilation, before it jumped back to Africa in February. The US case and sewage detections in London are high visibility setbacks. Still, polio has been 99.99% eradicated, thanks to a different, oral polio vaccine (OPV), dripped billions of times into the mouths of children across the…
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