Brittany Strickland, 33, who had not had the polio vaccine, was “deathly afraid” when she learned that the United States had seen its first case in ten years.
After learning that she had never received polio vaccinations as a youngster, the designer told AFP, “My mum was an anti-vaxxer,” this week.
It’s horrible, Strickland said. You don’t think it will happen here, and then a lot of people choose not to get immunized, and here we are.
Strickland had his vaccination in Pomona, New York’s Rockland County, where the first incidence of polio in the US since 2013 was discovered in July in a young man who had not received the vaccine and was experiencing paralysis as a result of the illness.
He had not traveled abroad, according to officials, indicating that the illness had spread locally.
According to local news reports, the sick guy belonged to the Orthodox Jewish community, where vaccine reluctance is more common.
In Rockland, there are many Orthodox Jews living. More than a dozen rabbis wrote an open letter last week pushing followers to get immunized.
Shoshana Bernstein, an Orthodox Jew, and independent health communicator warn that “any community that’s more insular” is vulnerable to anti-vax messages. Shoshana is educating community members about the value of immunization. She claims that the neighborhood does have seniors who can speak from personal experience.
Although it is too soon to determine if the lone case is a part of a small or larger outbreak, John Dennehy, a virologist at the City University of New York, worries that it may only be “the tip of the iceberg.”
Only a small portion of those who are infected will ever experience symptoms, and only a small portion of those individuals will ever get paralytic polio, according to him.
However, if enough people contract the disease, paralytic polio will gradually become more common.
