Episode Details

Todd DeVoe: if you have been paying attention to the news, you know that the polio virus has been found in the New York City sewage samples, according to city and state health departments.

They felt that this was something they were going to find because some virus cases have popped up north of New York City in Rockland and Orange counties. The detection of poliovirus in the wastewater samples in New York city's alarming but not surprising. According to Mary Bassett and the state health department working with local and federal partners responding urgently to continuing and being aggressive in investigating this polio spread.

When I was a kid, we all had shots. I always thought polio was a thing that was in the past. And like everything old comes back around again, this is something we're gonna have to consider. I sat down with Kelly McKinney, and we had a discussion about a whole bunch of different things, but also about the polio virus.

Because he's now working in the healthcare system, we put our predictive hats on our Nostradamus hats, if you will. And we were looking to see what is coming potentially in the future. If you guys know Kelly McKinney, you know he's a character with some interesting takes on things.

And for sure, we had this great conversation, a very smart and thoughtful way of looking at what could be happening in the near future when it comes to American politics and the impacts on emergency management. And even the metaverse, this is not a typical episode that you would hear on the emergency management network, but I thought it'd be great to share, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Kelly, What scares you more, Monkeypox or polio in the sewer systems? I mean that that's a pretty scary thing.

Kelly McKinney: yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question. I'll tell you about Bill Gates. Was there somebody who was interviewing Bill Gates, and he said, this polio thing is super scary. Like he was adamant about a big problem. This polio thing was. I figured he knows more than I do. So now I'm a little scared of the polio thing. And we're living with Monkeypox. I was just telling you that, just today, we started to see those curves come down the daily op; the daily case numbers just now beginning to come down a little bit.

So we may maybe knock wood. We may be over the hump in New York with Monkeypox, but we're sure not over the hump with polio. Polio is now. We're just seeing the leading edge of that. I don't know what. I don't even know what to think about polio. I don't know when it or if it's spreading, I don't know what that epi curve could look like because we were talking about that.

There are lots of folks that have been that have had a polio vaccine; you and I have had one. Are we still, are we, do we have immunity to polio? I hope

Todd DeVoe: so. I hope so too, but that's the question. How long does it last? I, we never talked about boosters or anything for that. We could get a titer test and see how we're doing on it. And, and then we had the younger kids. I don't think my kids aren't polio vaccinated. I think they stopped giving it out in the eighties?

Kelly McKinney: I don't know. I don't know. I remember a couple of things when I was in like second grade, and they hit me with a gun that, that's vaccine gun. Remember that? And it left. I was like, wow, I don't know what that, I think that was smallpox or something. And that's a monkeypox vaccine. So I don't know, they shot us up with a lot of stuff, Todd, and I think that explains a lot of why we're such a war.

Yeah. No, it's like, why are we weird? Like, why are we? I think it had to do with those vaccines back in the. It couldn't be anything else. It couldn't be all that bad TV we watched. I'll tell you something I'm worried about. I saw this thing the other day, and they were talking about the metaverse.

They did this research survey on teenagers and their socia