he U.K.’s most recent case of polio occurred in 1984, and the disease was declared formally eradicated there in 2004. But the country is on edge this week after the poliovirus was discovered in several sewage samples in London, giving rise to what government health officials call a “national incident.” No new cases of polio have been confirmed in the U.K.
The virus that was detected in London wastewater is not the so-called “wild” poliovirus, which used to circulate freely around the world but has now been eradicated in all but two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rather, it is what is known as “vaccine-derived” poliovirus. There are two types of polio vaccines: the injectable version, which uses a killed virus to confer immunity, and the oral version, which uses a live but weakened virus.
Officials have no way of knowing who the original source of the virus is, but it was likely a visitor from another country, since the U.K. switched from the oral to the injectable vaccine in 2004 to prevent precisely this kind of vaccine-derived circulation. While 86.
Public health officials, meanwhile, are trying to trace the original source of the contaminated sewage through the wastewater plant where it was first identified. The problem is that that plant handles waste from millions of people, making finding even the neighborhood from which the virus originated, much less the individual, unlikely.
For now, the virus does not appear to be circulating widely in the community. If any infections do turn up, health officials would be able to type the strain of the virus and determine if it’s the same as the one that was isolated in the sewage sample. Either way, the London scare is one more reminder that global eradication of polio, a long-sought goal, is tantalizingly close.
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