The World Health Organization issued an update Friday regarding a sudden outbreak of “vaccine-derived poliovirus.”
The Ministry of Health for the United Republic of Tanzania contacted WHO on July 4 after detecting vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 throughout the country, according to the emergency notice. After assessing the situation, WHO stated that the national risk of the outbreak was high due to a lack of surveillance on vaccine coverage “resulting in low population immunity and the ongoing population movement across neighbouring countries.”
Polio is a highly-infectious disease that predominantly impacts children under the age of 5-years. It causes permanent paralysis in roughly 1 in 200 infections, and kills between 2-10% of those paralyzed.
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— KAY SMYTHE (@KaySmythe) April 18, 2023
The strain currently infecting people in Tanzania and some surrounding nations is apparently “well-documented” and mutated from a strain in man-made vaccines. “In very rare instances, the vaccine-derived virus can genetically change into a form that can cause paralysis as does the wild poliovirus – this is what is known as a vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV),” WHO wrote in the emergency notice.
The disease spreads through person-to-person contact, often via food and water contaminated with fecal matter, WHO noted. (RELATED: Polio Is Circulating Through New York’s Sewage System, Infecting The Unvaccinated)
To combat the outbreak of the vaccine-derived virus, WHO suggests that everyone who plans to visit or has visited Tanzania or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) should get another vaccine.