The Chicago Department of Public Health announced Friday that it has begun monitoring the polio virus in sewage.

No cases of polio have been identified in Chicago or Illinois, but the department said it is actively testing water from plants in the city and nearby suburbs with several partner agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Polio has been considered eradicated in the United States since 1979 following the spread of a vaccine that began two decades earlier.

But one case of paralytic polio was identified in New York State in July 2022 and further wastewater testing discovered poliovirus in New York counties with low vaccination rates.

The New York case “highlights the importance of rapid detection,” CDPH Deputy Commissioner Massimo Pacilli said in a press release.

Like New York City health officials issued a warning last week are asking everyone traveling to Israel to get a full vaccination after four children recently tested positive in northern Israel.

Most adults and children in Illinois are vaccinated against polio. The Illinois Department of Health, like many other state health departments, requires children to be vaccinated against polio, among other diseases. enroll in school and children’s institutions.

Polio is a contagious disease for which there is no cure. It can infect a person’s spinal cord, causing paralysis, and before a vaccine was available, it was a major public health concern, with tens of thousands of cases reported annually in the US, according to the CDC. Many of his victims were children. Among those who suffered paralysis as a result of polio was President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Local sewage is already being monitored for COVID-19, which has helped health officials track down the virus during the pandemic.

rrequena@chicagotribune.com

The long-standing debate about the origins of covid-19 took a new turn this week after a French scientist noticed that genetic sequences entered into a database by Chinese researchers suggest that those responsible for the coronavirus could have come from animals such as raccoon dogs in Huanan. Seafood market in Wuhan.

Within a few days, the sequences were removed by the same researchers, although some other scientists had downloaded them in advance and are conducting further research.

“It is very important that any data relating to how this pandemic began be made available immediately,” Maria van Kerkhove This was announced by the World Health Organization (WHO) at a press conference on March 17.

“There are several hypotheses that need to be explored, including how the virus entered the human population: from a bat, through an intermediate host, or through a biosecurity breach in the laboratory. And we don’t have a definitive answer.”

The Huanan market has long been considered a likely source of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, as many of the first cases of covid-19 in December 2019 were in people associated with it, and the stalls sold a range of live and dead animals, not just seafood .

Bats are believed to be the original host of SARS-CoV-2, as they carry many coronaviruses, although SARS-CoV-2 has not yet been found in them. The ancestor of this virus may have passed from bats to a marketed intermediate host and then to humans.

An alternative explanation is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers are known to study bat coronaviruses but not SARS-CoV-2. While this is a less popular idea among scientists, the US Department of Energy said in February that this was the most likely explanation, but released no supporting evidence.

Now, genetic sequences uploaded by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention into a global virological database called GISAID may have shed more light on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. These sequences were obtained from swabs taken from various surfaces on the market in early 2020 after its closure.

They were noticed Florence Debarre at the French National Center for Scientific Research, which shared its findings with WHO on 14 March. “When I logged in, I focused on market sequences, but I didn’t expect to find the data that I found,” says Debarre.

Debarre refused to say anything else until her analysis was complete, but Van Kerkhove said at a press conference: “Among the samples that were positive for SARS-CoV-2, they saw evidence of animal DNA. Some of these animals include raccoon dogs.”

raccoon dogs (niktereutes procyonoides) have previously been found to be susceptible to and capable of spreading SARS-CoV-2. “We know they know how to wear it,” says Alice Hughes at the University of Hong Kong.

This does not prove that raccoon dogs or any other animals on the market were infected with the virus in December 2019, and such evidence is not available now, Hughes says.

Jonathan Stay of the Francis Crick Institute in London says: “The data appears to provide strong evidence that raccoon dogs and other animals were in the market at a critical time. This is another link in the chain that would be expected if the pandemic started in this way.”

In addition to the information Debarre shared, Van Kerkhove said the WHO has asked the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention to re-release the genetic data. “The big problem is that this data exists and that it is not available to the international community, let alone that it should have been available years ago.”

Regulators withdrew the signature “to send a message to distract people from crypto,” Mr. Frank told Bloomberg radio. “We have been chosen to be the personification of this message.” Signature does not invest, trade, hold or lend out digital tokens. But it protects the deposits of cryptocurrency companies and their clients in US dollars.

Crypto clients make up about 20% of Signature’s deposits, which is more than other banks but less than the bankrupt Silvergate Bank. Too much involvement in any one industry can be risky (see SVB), but Signature otherwise had a diverse deposit base that included many of New York’s leading law firms and real estate developers. Until last week, the biggest risk to her balance sheet seemed to be her strong presence in New York real estate. Like other banks, its assets also suffered from duration risk due to rising interest rates, which could lead to losses if it had to liquidate securities to pay off deposits, as it did last week.

On the Friday before the weekend closed, Signature lost $17.8 billion in deposits. But the bank had $4.54 billion in cash and $26.4 billion in marketable securities. He also reported a creditworthiness of $25.3 billion. All this should have been enough to stay in business. Mr. Frank says the bank’s executives on Sunday morning thought they had enough capital to keep going.

A new emergency Fed line of credit, announced Sunday night, would provide even more liquidity. But Signature was closed before it could take advantage of this superfood discount window.

Regulators did not directly dispute that the bank could survive the run. The state’s Department of Financial Services said it took over the bank because it “failed to provide reliable and consistent data, resulting in a severe crisis of confidence in the bank’s management” and “its ability to conduct business in a safe and secure manner on Monday.”

Does this mean that regulators can seize any bank whose leaders do not trust it? First Republic Bank’s problems seem more serious than Signature’s, but regulators have orchestrated a $30 billion deposit injection from major banks to prevent its collapse. Perhaps, as Mr. Frank suggests, regulators may have shut down Signature as part of their campaign to destroy the crypto industry.

Jan. 3 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued a statement saying that they “have serious safety and security concerns” regarding the risks associated with banking cryptocurrencies and will “closely monitor the risks associated with cryptoassets.”

A few weeks later, the National Economic Council released a policy statement advising banks not to transact with crypto clients. On Feb. 23, the Fed, FDIC and OCC issued another statement warning banks of the potential liquidity risks associated with stablecoins, which are backed by hard currency reserves and must be pegged to the US dollar.

Signature held reserves backing stablecoins. Regulators are ostensibly worried that crypto clients may rush to buy back all the stablecoins at once, leading to a drawdown in deposits, creating a liquidity shortage. This should not be an issue for banks with a diverse deposit base, and the risk of withdrawal is not unique to crypto, as we saw this week.

Regulators are ironically fueling the liquidity shortage they are supposedly trying to prevent by intimidating Signature depositors with their cryptocurrency. Having made crypto politically toxic, they have also concentrated crypto deposits in banks such as Silvergate and Signature.

With the government’s signature confiscated, crypto companies say they are struggling to get other banks to accept their deposits. While the FDIC is allegedly trying to sell Signature to another bank, Reuters reports that two sources have said that any buyer must agree to give up all cryptocurrency business at the bank, which the FDIC denies.

In any case, banks will be reluctant to bid on Signature due to legal risks, especially after this week’s leak where the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into Signature’s anti-money laundering protection. The buyer may have to opt out of Signature’s crypto clients in order to be protected from lawsuits and allegations from the government.

Signature has made mistakes in managing its balance sheet, but this should not be done on a summary basis because regulators have deemed some of their clients too politically toxic to exist.