CONTINUED TOLL: Although polio has disappeared from the Western Hemisphere and Europe, the virus still permanently cripples children in Africa and Asia every year.
Image: Joao Henriques/Redux Pictures
In Brief
- The global campaign to eradicate polio began in 1988. Since then, naturally occurring cases worldwide have dropped to, at last count, around 650 in 2011.
- Completely eliminating polio requires a change in the current vaccination program because one component in the most widely used vaccine now causes more cases of polio than it prevents.
- The World Health Assembly is expected to approve a plan this May that should decrease the number of vaccine-linked cases of polio and may speed up overall eradication efforts.
- Yet questions have arisen over the safety of making the change rapidly. If health officials do not manage this transition correctly, polio could continue to cripple children for years to come.
More In This Article
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Overview
Beating Polio in India
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Overview
Birth of a Cold War Vaccine
The shadows lengthen in a guesthouse cafeteria on the sprawling campus of christian Medical College, Vellore, in India. Wrapped up as he is in an issue that has possessed him for years, T. Jacob John notices neither the dying light nor the gathering mosquitoes. He is talking about the oral polio vaccine.
A slight man who speaks and moves with a speed that belies his 76 years, John is one of India’s leading polio experts. Trained as a pediatrician, virologist and microbiologist, he is also a longtime critic of the continued reliance on the oral polio vaccine—OPV in polio speak—used by the nearly 25-year-old international campaign to rid the planet of the paralyzing and sometimes fatal disease. The vaccine is at once an excellent and an imperfect tool. Inexpensive and easy to administer (each dose consists of a few drops of serum on the tongue), it has brought the world to the point where polio eradication is visible on the horizon. Indeed, the World Health Organization announced this past January that there have been no cases of naturally occurring polio in India for a year. But if the distribution of the vaccine is not choreographed with exquisite care, its continued use—at least as it is currently formulated—could actually keep the world from eliminating polio.
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9 Comments
Add CommentAny person that was subjected to the Bubonic Plague perished and in time this ravishing thing of evolution also perished. So it is with polio, aids, sars and all these new named things only thing now is we are interacting with drugs. This allows the possibility of creating through evolution new and more devastating diseases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/01/23/forests-are-dying-in-the-american-west-and-global-warming-is-likely-to-blame/
Bubonic plague has not disappeared nor has any of the other illnesses that may have been responsible for the black death. We have not evolved an immunity to it that everyone has or anything like this. We live in cleaner conditions. we do not have rat fleas biting us all the time. We also have antibiotics to cure the people who are infected with it before they die of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Japanese even used fleas in biological warfare dropping them on Ningbo They did cause epidemic outbreaks of the disease. There is nothing at all except modern medicine that is likely to combat most disease, though even some people are seemingly immune to even aids.
Bubonic plague has not disappeared nor has any of the other illnesses that may have been responsible for the black death. We have not evolved an immunity to it that everyone has or anything like this. We live in cleaner conditions. we do not have rat fleas biting us all the time. We also have antibiotics to cure the people who are infected with it before they die of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Japanese even used fleas in biological warfare dropping them on Ningbo They did cause epidemic outbreaks of the disease. There is nothing at all except modern medicine that is likely to combat most disease, though even some people are seemingly immune to even aids.
For more about people who are immune to HIV, check out the feature article "Blocking HIV's Attack" by Carl June and Bruce Levine, which ran in March 2012. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=blocking-hivs-attack
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article advocates use of injectable polio vaccine (which cost 20times more than the older OPV) because the oral vaccine is cause some
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this100 cases of vaccine derived polio cases and a similar number of vaccine associated polio paralysis, world wide. This seems a strange
awakening of conscience.
A paper published in the Ind J Med Ethics http://www.issuesinmedicalethics.org/pdfs/202co114.html.pdf shows that much more
important than the 200 odd cases of polio paralysis caused by the vaccine, is the huge epidemic of non-polio paralysis. In India there
were 47500 cases of this form of non polio paralysis where some 3000 was expected. The numbers of cases increased depending on the number
of rounds of polio vaccination in the community. The cases of non-polio paralysis increased exponentially after the 6th dose. In
states like Bihar where a child received up to 50 doses of OPV before he was 5years old, the number of non-polio AFP was over 30/100,000,
where as the expected number is 1-2/100,000. Inundation of the system with vaccine polio virus causing strain shifts to non-polio enterovirus is being blamed. The polio experts who are now lamenting the 200 cases of vaccine derived polio, were aware of this huge epidemic of paralysis, as all the data was being collected by the polio surveillance system but they chose not to act. The IJME article recommends that the number of doses of OPV needs to be rationalized and that water and sanitation needs to be improved to eradicate this water borne disease spread by the feco-oral route.
Instead of following this advise, it may be disastrous to switch to injectable poio. Only about 50% of India's population receive 3 doses
of the injectable DPT. We can expect coverage with IPV to be about the same, if the Government provides this vaccine free. The large numbers
who remain unprotected will trigger a new wave of polio paralysis. It is time that the interest of children rather than commercial interest
drive this agenda.
Anywhere there is something that will make you sick, there is something close by that will make you well or stop what is making you sick. That's how nature works and that is why we have been able to populate like we have. There is a plant called Virginia Snakeroot and it will neutralize snake venom. The American Southwestern Indians use this root all the time to build us resistance to snake bites and to drew out the venom when they are bitten. When I was much younger and just getting into science, I read, and I cannot remember in what magazine I read it, (the article was called 'Venom In My Vanes') but there was a herpetologist working on trying to find an antidote for cobra venom and he discovered an interesting property about the venom. His child was bed ridden with polio and at death's door, so he really did not have much to loose. He started injecting his child with micro drops of cobra venom and saved his child's life. I also think the article was condensed for Readers Digest, so there may be someone out there who can remember the article better than I. You can find cures in the most unlikely places.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVaccine "injury"is not new. MMR vaccine, for example, renders pre-schoolers deaf.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this#7 You mean, "CAN render pre-schoolers deaf"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMumps causes deafness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this