cheap_thoughts: Wait. Have I been vaccinated already?

If you went to almost any school, public or private, in the US in the past five decades, then yes.

These infections are clustered in NY because they're hitting communities of ultra-orthodox Hasidim whose schools do not take state or federal funding, so they don't adhere to state vaccination rules. Thus, there are pockets of unvaccinated people in those communities.

Note that this isn't "wild polio" like from the old days - this is actually a weakened form of the virus that came from an oral vaccine that other countries still administer. The downside to using a weakened but live virus is that it can still spread until the person who took the vaccine builds up immunity.

The US uses an "inactive virus" for a vaccine. The downside to using an inactive virus is that you can still spread the virus if you come into contact with a live version of it, years down the line. So if a vaccinated person from the US comes into contact with someone who just took the oral  vaccine, they can still catch the virus and spread it to other people without getting sick themselves. The vaccine keeps you from getting sick, but it doesn't prevent transmission.

That's what happened here. Someone came into contact overseas with a person who had gotten the oral vaccine. Then that someone came back to NY, right into an unvaccinated pocket, and spread it around. Now we have an outbreak.

And yeah, somewhere along the line there was either ass-eating or people weren't washing their hands very well.

BMFPitt: How durable is the immunity from whatever normal 1980s childhood dose?

If you got four as a child (you probably did) then you should still be covered. However, you can get one booster per lifetime, per the CDC:

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-duration-protection.html

Ask your doctor about it if you're worried. Unless you're eating piles of shiat in a known outbreak area, I wouldn't worry too much.

Marshmallow Jones: Lsherm: cheap_thoughts: Wait. Have I been vaccinated already?

If you went to almost any school, public or private, in the US in the past five decades, then yes.

These infections are clustered in NY because they're hitting communities of ultra-orthodox Hasidim whose schools do not take state or federal funding, so they don't adhere to state vaccination rules. Thus, there are pockets of unvaccinated people in those communities.

Oh they take plenty of public money, and they squander it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyregion/hasidic-yeshivas-schools-new-york.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

That seems to be a NY problem. In most states, to the point that I want to say all states, polio vaccinations are handled by school mandates. And while the rules vary here and there, private schools that use even a scintilla of state resources must adhere to those mandates.

So while I attended Catholic schools growing up in Ohio, I rode a county bus to get there, thus any of the mandates you had to follow for a public school I also had to follow. Annual state exams? We took them. In most school districts it's not even a question.