"Clearly a confirmed case of polio in the United States is major news." Irina Gelman, Commissioner of Health, Orange County, which is next door to Rockland. "It's very difficult to predict how many people, but it's definitely a number of individuals that would have to be actively transmitting," says Dr. Which is why, in public health, just one case of paralytic polio constitutes an outbreak - the tip of the iceberg. Most of the time, there are no symptoms at all. "I wake up like, 'Oh my God, is there another case?'"Ī very small percentage of people with polio become paralyzed. "I'll check my phone about seven times a night," she says. The news of paralytic polio had Bernstein in knots. In fact, Montal was told stories of her own family members who died or were paralyzed by the disease.ĭuring COVID, she worked on the county's COVID vaccine information campaign, alongside Rockland County resident Shoshana Bernstein, an independent health communicator. Plain and simple."īefore the vaccine was rolled out across the U.S., paralysis and children in braces and wheelchairs were among the haunting images of outbreaks from the 1940s and 50s. "And once it's paralytic polio, you're paralyzed. "Polio cannot be cured," Montal explains. "Do I as an individual, and do we collectively, as a county and as a community, have the strength to go through this again?," she wondered.Īri Daniel for NPR Shoshana Bernstein and Mona Montal have joined forces in Rockland County to become a vital conduit between official public health messaging and the hearts and minds of their neighbors.Īnd polio, with its possibility of paralysis, is an especially terrifying disease.
Mona Montal - chief of staff for the town of Ramapo in Rockland county - remembers what went through her head: "Here we go again." She was, of course, thinking of the grueling last two plus years of combatting COVID. The news about the paralytic case circulated amongst those in local government before it was announced to the public. Are we catching them? Probably not."Īnd health officials have to tackle this outbreak in a moment of rising wariness towards public health fueled by the COVID crisis. "Are there probably dozens, if not hundreds, if not more cases of undetected polio in our population? Probably. Rockland County is basically Connecticut." Because people travel so much, diseases like polio can spread quickly, he explains. "Rockland County is basically New York City," says Perry Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University. The challenges that health officials are facing while managing the local response in New York may indicate where other spots in the country could soon be headed. Low vaccination rates in Rockland county mean there's a risk of more paralytic cases in that community, the report said. "Even a single case of paralytic polio represents a public health emergency in the United States," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared in a recent report. And it recently was detected in New York City's wastewater.
Wastewater testing and genetic sequencing have shown the virus has been quietly circulating in a couple New York counties since at least May. Though it's just one case of paralysis at the moment, public health officials - both locally and nationally - are taking the news very seriously. The Americas were declared polio free in 1994. The last time there was community transmission of polio in the U.S. But earlier this summer, an individual in Rockland County, N.Y., contracted the virus likely from exposure in this country, and ended up paralyzed. Polio is the disease most people thought we had put behind us here in the United States.
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