New York authorities then detected the virus in sewage in Rockland and neighboring Orange County—evidence of transmission in the local community. This first case prompted authorities in the UK and Israel to increase their surveillance—they also found polio. A polio crisis may be brewing. However, despite describing polio as “one of the most feared diseases in the US,” the CDC tries to maintain absolute government control over testing for the polio virus. Only the feds and some states that already do polio testing will be equipped to track the pathogen. If it rejects the materials and testing protocols private labs — like Massachusetts-based surveillance startup BioBot — will need to detect and monitor the virus, the CDC risks allowing the virus to spread undetected in some communities while limiting the study of a possible focus. “They want to do it themselves,” Vincent Racaniello, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University, told The Daily Beast. “Just like they wanted to control the COVID tests at the beginning of the pandemic.” The thing is, even the CDC admits it failed the initial response to COVID. Last week, Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, told the agency’s 11,000 employees that the CDC needed a top-to-bottom overhaul. “To be honest, we’ve been responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,” Walensky said. The CDC may be about to repeat some of its mistakes. Amy Kirby, an Emory University epidemiologist who directs the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System, did not respond to a request for comment. The polio virus is transmitted through direct contact with feces. Before the invention of an oral vaccine in the early 1950s and a sweeping childhood vaccination campaign, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis in the US alone each year. Vaccines destroyed polio. By the 1970s, the disease had virtually disappeared from all but a handful of the poorest and most remote countries, such as Afghanistan. When it resurfaced, it was usually the result of international travel—and local health authorities quickly isolated those infected and stopped further spread. The CDC tracked poliovirus in a US community only once between 1979 and 2022. In 2005, the Minnesota Department of Health identified poliovirus in an unvaccinated little girl in a mostly unvaccinated Amish community. Three other children became ill before the virus was contained. “[It] it shouldn’t be hard to do.” Today 90 percent or more of people in the wealthiest countries, including the US, are vaccinated against polio. However, childhood vaccination rates are falling as anti-inflammatory behaviors take hold among a growing minority of people. It’s no coincidence that Rockland County, where the CDC identified the polio virus last month, has a lower vaccination rate than the rest of the country: about 60 percent. “The occurrence of this case, combined with the detection of poliovirus in sewage in neighboring Orange County, underscores the importance of maintaining high vaccination coverage to prevent paralytic poliomyelitis in people of all ages,” the CDC said in a report that posted last week. The stakes for public health could not be higher as the world grapples not only with the ongoing COVID pandemic, but also with the accelerating outbreak of monkeypox. However, the potential looming disaster has not prompted the CDC to release to private laboratories the DNA primers that would be needed to detect polio. “Essentially no one is allowed to do it except the public [i.e. government] health labs,” Rob Knight, head of a genetic computing lab at the University of California, San Diego, told the Daily Beast. Without the primers and other materials, private labs—and the researchers associated with those labs—can’t help the government find polio in other communities. Racaniello compared the CDC’s reluctance to expand polio testing to the equally tight control of testing for COVID during the early months of the novel coronavirus pandemic. “Which didn’t work out well,” Racaniello noted in a tweet. The worst-case scenario is that polio spreads for weeks without anyone realizing it – the way monkeypox spread unnoticed at first, as many doctors dismissed it as herpes or some other sexually transmitted disease. The CDC’s insolence appears to be bureaucratic. Technically, detecting the polio virus in wastewater is no more difficult than detecting SARS-CoV-2 or any other virus, Knight explained. Take a sample from the sewage, do a PCR test. But in the US, regulations on polio are stricter than on other diseases. “From a regulatory standpoint, you have to consider any sample that might contain polio,” Knight said. Polio monitoring, he added, is “a bureaucratic nightmare to create.” There is also the cost factor. Increasing polio testing in private laboratories could cost millions of dollars. And labs may want government help to pay for it. CDC leaders may have noticed the growing reluctance of the US Congress to pay for COVID testing and concluded that it is easier for the CDC to continue polio testing domestically. But easier doesn’t necessarily mean better, not when it comes to public health. With little effort and little money, private labs could bolster the government’s surveillance system. “[It] it shouldn’t be difficult to test sewage,” James Lawler, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told the Daily Beast. “BioBot and others already doing surveillance could rise quickly.” Speed ​​and comprehensive surveillance matter when it comes to infectious diseases. A little effort on the CDC’s part, and some government funding, could make the difference between a once-in-a-generation polio epidemic breaking out in a couple of small New York counties, or a much larger epidemic that could affect entire USA Or even the whole world.