Inews
As part of routine surveillance, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has found poliovirus in sewage samples from North and East London. While it is normal for a few polioviruses to be detected each year in British sewage samples, these have always been one-off findings that were not detected again. These previous detections occurred when an individual vaccinated overseas with the live oral polio vaccine returned or travelled to the UK and briefly “shed” traces of the virus in their faeces. But this time, the situation is a bit different. Investigations are now underway after several “closely-related” viruses were found in sewage samples collected in the Spring of this year. It is now classified as a “vaccine-derived” poliovirus type two, which suggests that there has been some person-to-person spread in the local community.
The last case of wild polio contracted in the UK was confirmed in 1984 and the country was declared polio-free in 2003. In rare cases, the kind of poliovirus that has just been detected can cause serious illness, such as paralysis, in people who are not fully vaccinated. While the UKHSA has insisted that the risk to the public is “extremely low”, this news tells us something very concerning about the current state of medicine and public health.
Severe public health cuts in the 2010s not only left the UK more vulnerable to Covid-19, but threaten the re-emergence of all sorts of diseases that we thought were relegated to the past.
In 2012, legislation moved public health from the NHS to local authorities, whose budgets were hit the hardest by austerity measures. Between 2010 and 2018, local authority budgets were cut by nearly a third and the public health grant fell by £700m in real terms between 2014/15 and 2019/20. English life expectancy stalled, poverty increased, and health inequalities deepened.
These problems hampered the UK’s pandemic response with Covid-19 highlighting debilitating flaws in England’s public health systems that were decades in the making. At the height of the pandemic in 2021, the Government chose to replace Public Health England as part of a large restructuring of the public health system. However, 42 per cent of public health doctors believe that these changes will make the response to this pandemic and future outbreaks worse not better…
