Global efforts to eradicate the crippling disease of polio have suffered a significant blow after the highly contagious Wild Poliovirus (WPV) was confirmed in a sewage sample collected in Hamburg, Germany. This finding marks the first detection of the virus in the country more than 30 years after the last recorded human case.
German officials stated that the confirmation of poliovirus in the sewage sample demonstrates that their dedicated surveillance efforts are effectively working. Crucially, the Ministry of Health confirmed that no human cases of polio have been reported in Germany thus far. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this is the first confirmation of poliovirus presence in a European country since 2010.
Origin and Types of the Virus
The poliovirus strain identified in the German sewage sample is linked to the strain currently circulating in Afghanistan. This same strain was previously found in Malawi and Mozambique in 2022. The highly rare Wild Poliovirus (Type 1) is now endemic only to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
A second type, Vaccine-Derived Poliovirus (VDPV), which emerges in rare cases where the weakened live virus used in immunization mutates, is also circulating globally. Since 2022, both WPV and VDPV have been detected through routine sewage sampling in several polio-free European countries, including Germany, Spain, and the UK, underscoring the constant threat of re-importation.
