The territory hasn't had any polio cases for 25 years but this suggests the virus is spreading. Polio experts are scrambling to figure out the origins and whether or not there are active cases.
Palestinian children are sitting on a street flooded with sewage water in Deir el-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on July 23. Polio was detected in multiple samples of Gaza's wastewater a week ago and now infectious disease experts suspect there are mild cases of the disease already in the population.When Dr. Ayadil Saparbekov was in Gaza late last week, he saw a scene that’s become familiar since the war started: Sewage overflowing in the streets.
The news sparked an international investigation. This week teams of investigators arrived in Gaza and fanned out in search of active cases of polio. They're collecting stool samples, interviewing parents and combing through medical records in search of paralysis cases, one of the most serious symptoms of the disease. They haven’t found any cases yet but infectious disease experts say it’s likely circulating silently in the population with asymptomatic and mild cases.
This rough timeline is “very, very important information” according to Dr. Olakunle Alonge, director of the Sparkman Center for Global Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He says it’s an indication that the virus is “likely to have spread through a lot of people,” meaning there’s a good chance it has mutated and became more virulent and, therefore, more likely to make people sick.
Raul Andino, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, set out to fix this problem. He modified the viral genome used in the vaccine to make it less likely to mutate. “If in 25 years you don't see some disease, you may simply forget how it looks,” he says, explaining that they are reminding clinicians about the symptoms and how to store a fecal sample for testing.
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