The city of London will offer vaccine booster shots to children under the age of 10 after New York became the first city in a decade to confirm a case of the disease.
The community health worker is showing a vaccine.
According to the United Kingdom's Health Security Agency, children between the ages of 1 to 9 are eligible for the booster shot, which will ensure a high level of protection from paralysis.
The amount of virus as well as its genetic diversity suggests there has been some level of virus transmission that has gone beyond a close network.
The first areas where the samples were found will be the focus of the new booster program.
The U.K.'s campaign comes after New York health officials revealed that an unvaccinated man became paralyzed from the first case of vaccine-derived polio in almost a decade in the state. New York officials have urged people who haven't gotten the vaccine to get it.
Some countries in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia have seen an increase in vaccine-derived cases in the last few years, despite the fact that the world has been free of the disease for decades. People who have received a vaccine can excrete the live virus in their stool. After contact with the sewage, the virus has the ability to cause illness and even death. Several countries still use a live oral vaccine, though experts are trying to modify it to reduce transmission risk.
Most of the time, polio is transmitted through contact with fecal samples. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 15,000 people a year would develop paralysis from the disease before the vaccine was invented. The last case of the disease in the United Kingdom was in 1984. The World Health Organization says that 98% of people in the U.K. had beenvaccinated against the disease by the end of the decade. In June, health officials said the most likely source of the sewage samples was a person who had received a vaccine. Most of the viruses found in London's sewage samples are less worrisome than the vaccine-like ones. The areas of London where the disease has been found have some of the lowest vaccination rates, putting those in the community who are not fully vaccined at greater risk.
Around 1 million children in London gave up their vaccine after it was found in sewage.
It is the first time in decades that the disease has been detected in the sewage.
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