Polio’s source could be traced back to a single house or street, a minister claimed today amid fears the paralysis-causing virus is once again spreading in Britain.
Lord Kamall said ‘world-beating’ tactics learned during the Covid pandemic were being deployed to track down ‘patient zero’.
He revealed the investigation will see officials ‘go along the pipes’ to locate where the virus — not responsible for an outbreak in the UK since the mid-1980s — came from.
Positive samples were first detected at a sewage plant in Beckton, which covers a population of 4million people in North and East London. Signs of it were first found in February.
‘In theory it might be possible to find individual households and streets but it is too early,’ Lord Kamall said.
UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) bosses think a traveller, possibly from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Nigeria, shed the virus in their faeces after getting a live oral vaccine, which is used in some countries with current outbreaks as it has…
