Global eradication of polio has been the ultimate game of Whack-a-Mole for the past decade; when it seems the virus has been beaten into submission in a final refuge, up it pops in a new region. Now, as vanquishing polio worldwide appears again within reach, another insidious threat may be in store from infection sources hidden in plain view.
Polio’s latest redoubts are “chronic excreters,” people with compromised immune systems who, having swallowed weakened polioviruses in an oral vaccine as children, generate and shed live viruses from their intestines and upper respiratory tracts for years. Healthy children react to the vaccine by developing antibodies that shut down viral replication, thus gaining immunity to infection. But chronic excreters cannot quite complete that process and instead churn out a steady supply of viruses. The oral vaccine’s weakened viruses can mutate and regain wild polio’s hallmark ability to paralyze the people it infects. After coming into wider awareness in the mid-1990s, the condition shocked researchers.
Philip Minor, deputy director of the U.K.’s National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, describes the biomedical nightmare: Wild polioviruses stop circulating. Countries cut back on vaccination efforts. A chronic excreter kisses an unvaccinated baby, and the baby goes to day care. “And zappo,” he adds, “it’s all over the place, with babies drooling all over each other. So you could see a scenario where polio would come back from a developed country.”
But surely there must be more to this story? There has been an increase of reports on how vaccines are dangerous and possibly causing a lot of other dissorders, mostly seen in children, such as autism.
Why is it that the polio vaccine appears to have been so succesful, yet other vaccines seem to cause so much damage? Is the polio vaccine the only one that really works and is not in need of multiple stabilisers such as mercury or anti-freeze? I am not aware of the full ingredients of the polio vaccine, but these things cross my mind.
The success of the polio vaccine can only be measured in time as we do not know the future implications of trying to wipe out such a disease. It could come back twice as strong and cripple millions of lives far faster and we may never get rid of it. We have recently been hearing of new strains of flu that are not killed off by previous vaccines so these bugs are becoming super bugs and we are struggling to keep up with them.
The hidden threat that could prevent Polio’s global eradication
No comments:
Post a Comment