Authorities in the UK are set to re-launch a child vaccination campaign in London in response to a polio outbreak in the capital.
British authorities are to re-launch efforts to see every child in London aged from 1 to 11 vaccinated against Polio after an outbreak of the disease last year.
An initial campaign to see all children jabbed was started last year after the formerly extinct disease was found in the city’s sewer system, with the virus thought to have possibly re-entered open-borders Britain from abroad.
Despite this attempt to get the population most vulnerable to the disease vaccinated, uptake for the childhood polio jab in London remains well below the national average, with the country’s National Health Service now set to renew efforts to get more children inoculated against the virus, which can cause paralysis and even death.
“Until we reach every last child, we cannot be sure that we will not see a case of paralysis,” The Telegraph reports Dr Vanessa Saliba of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) as saying regarding the outbreak.
“Even a single case of paralysis from polio would be a tragedy as it is completely preventable,” she continued. “Only by improving vaccination coverage across all communities can we ensure resilience against future disease threats.”
Initially detected in the city last summer, the ongoing Polio outbreak is thought to be the result of the live oral polio vaccine (OPV), a form of inoculation that involves the administration of live but weakened forms of the polio virus to the individual given the vaccination.
Although the vaccine is reportedly effective in preventing polio infections, it also results in the person who takes it shedding a “vaccine-like virus” in their stool, which can then sometimes mutate into a far more harmful “vaccine-derived” poliovirus that can once again cause great harm to humans.
Scientists now reportedly believe that, while the OPV is not used in Britain, the outbreak can nevertheless be traced back to this inoculation method as someone may have been administered this type of vaccine abroad before entering the country.
As a result, London has now seen a return of a virus that had previously been rendered completely extinct in Britain since 2003, with experts now fearing that the country could see its first case of paralysis caused by polio since 1984.
The good news is that experts in the country believe that while the virus is still circulating amongst the London population, recent sewage samples appear to show that such transmission is down compared to last year.
Virus particles have also still only been found in samples gathered from parts of east and north London, suggesting that the disease has yet to see any sort of significant spread to other parts of the city.