The discovery that polio has partially paralyzed a young man in a New York suburb feels wearying, yet shocking. Wearying, because it’s the third highly infectious virus to make a surprise landfall in the US in three years, after monkeypox and SARS-CoV-2. And shocking because, for decades, polio hasn’t spread in rich nations, where sanitation, vaccination, and solid public health funding are presumed to keep populations safe. Transmission was eliminated in the US in 1979, all of the Americas in 1994, and the UK in 2003. And yet there it was, in the wastewater of the county where the young man lives and a neighboring one, in New York
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