Governor Hochul Declares State Disaster Emergency, Bolstering Immunization Drive – E.O. Immediately Expands Network of Vaccine Administrators, Adding EMS Workers, Midwives, and Pharmacists.

On Thursday, August 12, 2002 the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) announced that they had found poliovirus in wastewater samples from two counties, Orange County and Rockland County, in June and July. This water polio announcement came two weeks after the NYSDOH had announced on July 21 that an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County had gotten infected with the poliovirus and as a result became paralyzed. If you are wondering, “hmmm, polio, I don’t get it,” that’s because the U.S. was declared polio-free in 1979. That declaration came after years of public health efforts to get the U.S. population vaccinated against this dangerous and potentially deadly virus. Yet, such reappearance of the poliovirus in New York raises more concerns that continuing anti-vaccination campaigns may be setting our country back many decades and laying to waste all the hard work that had gotten the U.S. polio-free in the first place.