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The case was confirmed in Rockland County, the New York State Department of Health announced Thursday, July 21.
State and county health officials said they were advising medical practitioners and healthcare providers to be on the lookout for additional cases.
"Based on what we know about this case, and polio in general, the Department of Health strongly recommends that unvaccinated individuals get vaccinated or boosted with the FDA-approved IPV polio vaccine as soon as possible," New York State Health Commissioner Mary Bassett said.
"The polio vaccine is safe and effective, protecting against this potentially debilitating disease, and it has been part of the backbone of required, routine childhood immunizations recommended by health officials and public health agencies nationwide."
Polio is a highly contagious, viral disease that can affect the nervous system and cause muscle weakness. It typically enters the body through the mouth, usually from hands contaminated with the fecal matter of an infected person.
Respiratory and oral-to-oral transmission through saliva may also occur, officials said.
Symptoms of polio include fatigue, fever, headache, stiffness, muscle pain, and vomiting, and can take up to 30 days to appear, during which time an infected person can be transmitting the virus to others.
Health officials said while rare, some polio cases can result in paralysis or death.
The New York case was identified through sequencing performed by the Wadsworth Center, the health department's public health laboratory, and confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Based on that sequencing, health officials concluded the case involved a transmission chain from an individual who received the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which is no longer authorized or administered in the US, where only the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) has been given since 2000.
Officials said that suggests that the virus may have originated in a location outside of the US where OPV is administered.
Once considered one of the most feared diseases in the country, polio was virtually eliminated from the US following the development of vaccines in the 1950s.
No cases of polio have originated in the US since 1979 and the last time the virus was brought into the country by travelers was in 1993, according to the CDC.
The last known case in the US was in 2013.
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