Alarm bells triggered as polio resurfaces amid waning vax take-up in Americas
Published:Saturday | September 17, 2022 | 12:09 AM
Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton and PAHO representative Ian Stein have raised concern about the declining rate of vaccination in the Americas at a time when New York in the United States has announced a state of emergency in the wake of the emergence of polio.
“And it is not just only the issue of vaccine-derived polio that is troubling. It is the fact of the low rates of vaccines coverage for polio in many parts of Canada, the United States and in many countries of the Americas,” Stein said while speaking on Friday at a handover ceremony of COVID-19 response equipment to the Ministry of Health & Wellness.
The exercise took place at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/World Health Organization country office at The University of the West Indies, Mona.
Stein pointed out that the emergence of a vaccine-derived poliovirus circulating and an unvaccinated population could spell big trouble.
He said that in the Americas, there was a long-term downward trend in the coverage of routine immunisation, including polio.
The PAHO representative indicated that a pool of susceptible people could fall victim to polio, measles, diphtheria and tetanus, among other diseases.
Stein said that vaccine-derived polio has been detected in different places around the world.
He said that there was an urgent need to rethink how routine immunisation is addressed, noting that one of the reasons that people in the Americas enjoy such great life expectancy was because of the high levels of vaccination in the past.
Tufton, who shared Stein’s concerns, said there was a need for Jamaica and other countries in the region to review their immunisation policies.
Worrying decline
With an 80 per cent immunisation rate in the Americas, Tufton said that this declining rate was very worrying against the background of the re-emergence of polio.
Highlighting a pedestrian 30 per cent take-up of COVID-19 vaccines locally, Tufton called for a comprehensive review of the perception and the importance of getting immunised.
“A big part of our human development index why we live to 76 years as women and 74 years as men is because we get that jab when we were in school. We had to line up to get the vaccine,” the health and wellness minister said.
He noted that the trend away from immunisation was perhaps triggered by the anti-vax movement that has been pushing its strong views against vaccination.
“We, as leaders in public health, need to place a significant emphasis on the post-COVID era to ignite the interest and support for immunisation to secure the future generation,” he said.
In a Gleaner interview, Tufton said that the health ministry has a significant surveillance mechanism that assesses risks in relation to viruses.
Tufton said that the ministry is monitoring the polio situation and is working with PAHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US to address these concerns.
He said that the Ministry of Health has looked at it to determine if the threat level is at a point where it requires internal mechanisms to be put in place and the extent to which those mechanisms are put in place.
On September 9, this month, New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency over concerns that polio could be spreading in the state.
The poliovirus has been detected in the wastewater of multiple New York counties in recent weeks, suggesting a community spread among unvaccinated people, officials announced recently.