United States: The health officials have raised alarm, as poliovirus has been detected in the sewage in Germany, Poland, and Spain.
Nonetheless, none of these countries has recorded actual incidences of poliomyelitis (or polio for short), which is deemed as a highly infectious disease that favors children and has the potential to affect the nervous system and lead to paralysis in the worst-case scenario.
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However, local and global health authorities, encouraged by the recent detections in Warsaw, Barcelona, Munich, Bonn, Cologne, and Hamburg, said European countries must strengthen their disease surveillance systems and ensure there are no crevices in the vaccination rollout that the virus can exploit.
Even as European countries were celebrating polio’s defeat in 2002, polio remained in other countries, so the infections could be brought to European countries and start circulating among the population that did not receive the vaccine.
Moreover, as Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesperson for polio eradication efforts at the World Health Organization (WHO), stated, “Anytime that you detect any poliovirus, in any form, from any source, in a previously polio-free area is unusual,” euronews.com reported.
Concerns have been raised by Polish health officials to parents, saying children should get immunized and replenish their stores of polio vaccines. The German health ministry also provides free tests to medical facilities to check the possibility of human infection.
Vaccination coverage among the one-year-olds in Poland last year was 85 per receiving the polio vaccine, which is amongst the lowest in Europe. Of that total, 93 percent were in Spain, and 91 percent were in Germany, according to WHO statistics.
Roughly, it is necessary to immunize 80 percent of the population in order to protect it from infection, according to the opinion of professionals, while Polish authorities stated that the figure is 95 percent among children and adolescents only.
That is why national averages can obscure specific local problems; there might be regions with low immunization rates that provide the virus with the means to spread.