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From my understanding - there are two main “strains” for polio; one that is “wild”; endemic to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one derived from the oral vaccine,
by _s 4y ago
From my understanding - there are two main “strains” for polio; one that is “wild”; endemic to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one derived from the oral vaccine, endemic in Africa and a lot of conflict zones, from Asia to
Europe to Central / Southern Americas.
The oral vaccine in use in a lot of the world contains a weakened version of the virus, and allows your body to fight it off without any negative effects. This is usually a 3 or 4 course vaccine.
This specifically engineered weakened virus has been shown to mutate and infect other partially or non vaccinated individuals, including causing paralysis, and is the one now popping up in more developed / inoculated areas - but again, in unvaccinated individuals.
Note - from what I have read, you can still get and spread polio even if you are vaccinated (much like Covid), but it’s an incredibly low chance - and furthermore, your risk of serious disease / paralysis / death is even lower (so we know the vaccines work). The oral vaccine (weakened virus) efficacy is much higher than the injected (inactive virus) vaccine too, and boosters are offered for those who had the vaccines as children and are now adults.
There is also another oral vaccine, with a weakened virus, that has been engineered to prevent certain mutations that cause it to spread (if I read some articles correctly), but is not currently approved for use in the US / UK.
Polio was one of the first few horrible diseases almost eradicated by vaccines. Whatever your stance on getting vaccinated, do understand that Polio has a 1 in 200 chance of resulting in severe symptoms and paralysis, and there is no treatment for it - only prevention via inoculation. It is not like Covid where mostly the older, more immunocompromised suffer - it will ravage children and healthy adults too.
- pm90 4y agoIm tired of saying this but it’s absolutely mind boggling how fucked up it is that one of the main exports from America today is vaccine hesitancy. Science skepticism has always been a thing; its only in recent years though that internet has allowed the rapid spread of disinformation. Glossy content created for misinforming Americans inspires copycats in other countries. It’s really depressing.
- ryandrake 4y agoYou're very kind calling it "hesitancy", too! I know that's the soft euphemism that the media has coalesced around, but "hesitancy" implies that one is on the fence, unsure, open to debate and open to being convinced. That's not what America is exporting. America's Anti-Vax movement is religiously sure of itself. They aren't on the fence. They're not weighing the pros and cons. They're convinced that they know the secret capital-T Truth, and that spreading their gospel saves lives. COVID brought it mainstream, but if you look back at the "Anti-vax Moms groups" long before COVID, there was still no hesitancy. Their minds were also made up.
- VLM 4y ago
- mongol 4y agoI understand it as they have faith in their beliefs despite lack of scientific evidence
- anigbrowl 4y agoThis seems to be a international effort, sadly. Article is also pre-covid. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> America's Anti-Vax movement is religiously sure of itself. They aren't on the fence. They're not weighing the pros and cons. This is the activist wing of the movement. Many more Americans are genuinely, in many cases reasonably, hesitant.
- mentalpiracy 4y agoI don't actually believe this anymore. Hesitancy is a cover for those who lack the confidence to publicly affirm their anti-vaccination attitudes.
- swatcoder 4y ago> Science skepticism has always been a thing; its only in recent years though that internet has allowed the rapid spread of disinformation. Glossy content created for misinforming Americans inspires copycats in other countries. It’s really depressing. It may be depressing, but it's not helpful to associate it with "science skepticism". The vaccine "hesitant" you refer to are not skeptical of science. They freely use the language and processes of science as their argument. You or I may think they misuse the language, make unconvincing assumptions, etc, but there's nothing to it that's skeptical of science. Where vaccine hesitancy is rooted in science skepticism, you see the hesitant relying on alternative means of knowing why vaccines aren't right for them. You can think of the classic faith healing communities l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶S̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶J̶e̶h̶o̶v̶a̶h̶'̶s̶ ̶W̶i̶t̶n̶e̶s̶s̶e̶s̶ as an example of that. The contagious skepticism that you're talking about is of institutions and authority. They don't trust Fauci or the CDC or the WHO or Pfizer or whomever to to communicate honestly, objectively, and in their own interests. They believe that these institutions can not be trusted to communicate scientific knowledge free of political bias. And when you look at it that way, of course America is the exporter of that. While responsible for founding some impressive modern institutions, the founding myth of the nation is all about skepticism of institution and authority. The country is constitutionally designed to live in perpetual tension with itself, and that's what's getting exported now.
- retox 4y agoCan you expand on what you mean by 'The country is constitutionally designed to live in perpetual tension with itself'? Let's also not lose sight of the fake vaccine operation run by the CIA in Pakistan to catch Bin Laden. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
- miguelazo 4y agoThank you-- the CIA's fake vaccine operation should be in the first or second paragraph of every article that discusses polio outbreaks. It has had a huge effect on public health.
- 4y ago
- bvoq 4y agoYeah, I wish it was only America, but the UK have their own antivaxx propagandists. What's the motivation behind this anyways? Aren't there other topics to make money off off, like spreading flat earth information?
- MichaelCollins 4y agoMost people spreading flat earth memes never make a penny from it. Their payoff is the arguments and frustration it causes. Trolls, not shills.
- babypuncher 4y agoIt became a political tool during the pandemic. People who were already campaigning on a general distrust of government institutions capitalized on this as a way to attract idiots into voting for them.
- beambot 4y agoTo be fair, America-induced vaccine hesitancy isn't just a byproduct of the modern zeitgeist; the CIA has been using vaccine drives as cover for foreign operations for decades, including the most recent documented use in 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI’ve been pro vaccine since forever but the idea that vaccines with decades of testing have the same risk profile as an experimental vaccine rushed through the labs to combat a deadly new disease is absurd.
- flukus 4y agoNothing goes through decades of testing, they go through human trials and then monitor safety at a mass scale for a year or two and then they're done. Same as with the covid vaccines.
- eric-hu 4y agoI read spaceman’s comment as saying decades of public use is the additional testing.
- logic_beats_pro 4y agoThe previous average vaccine testing duration was ~5 years. Let's not pretend that the mRNA vaccines were even close to that. Fun fact, the Omicron BA.5 booster isn't tested at all.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoYou can amass 1000 person-years of testing with 10 subjects and 100 years, or with 1000 subjects and 1 year. Or with some intermediate ramp-up plan. The "decades of public use" metric needs to also take into account how widespread that use is. Now consider how many doses of mRNA vaccines have been given worldwide (1), since the public rollouts began in December 2020. mRNA vaccines are no longer unknown, at all. 1) Billions of doses https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ChrisCinelli 4y agoApparently it is not only an American thing. José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, the founder, CEO and president of the European pharmaceutical giant PharmaMar, a pharmaceutical company that creates and distributes drugs to treat coronavirus, was caught with fake paperwork that stated he was fully vaccinated. I am not sure why someone leading a large pharmaceutical company would decide not to take the vaccine and pay a large sum of money to get fake paperwork with the risk of being caught but he was also obviously VERY hesitant. You would think he knows better...
- kurupt213 4y agoNot getting the covid vaccine and not getting the polio vaccine are 2 entirely different things. Most of the population is not at risk from covid
- origin_path 4y agoHearing that fact and then concluding he must just "not know better" is exactly the sort of vaccine fanaticism that creates anti vaxxers and vast numbers of hesitants. The obvious conclusion is that a highly informed person - who would also have access to non public information - thought the risks significantly outweighed the benefits for him and that he wanted to avoid taking it badly enough to break the law. Yet to people on HN it's just a totally inexplicable mystery why anyone wouldn't want to take a new experimental vaccine every morning with their breakfast cereal. Note that the German health minister was also caught lying about his own vaccine history. He claimed to have taken a fourth shot but then rather stupidly flashed his own vaccine passport on TV, so other people scanned it and found he'd actually never done so. Given these sorts of facts the truly disturbing anti-rationalists are out in abundance on this thread, and they're not the hesitants!
- baybal2 4y ago[dead]
- hilbert42 4y agoI dispair. That people can think so irrationally that they'd risk dying in preference to being vaccinated has truly shaken my faith in humanity.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoIt is not only an American thing. Andrew Wakefield's actions have contributed to this problem since 1998, and he is British, so it's not just being lead from the USA, it's an international con. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield And more recently there's Piers Corbyn and co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn
- Nokinside 4y agoSome old pictures of what it looked like in hospitals: https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=images+from+polio+hospital&hl=en https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=images+... Horrible disease.
- brippalcharrid 4y agoAt least some of the images that come up in that Google Images search are from the Cutter Incident, which was caused by a Polio vaccine, much like the current outbreaks that we're seeing, so that probably wasn't the best example.
- curtisf 4y agoIt's worth noting that the Cutter incident involved contaminated/improperly produced inactivated-virus vaccines. The article implicates live virus vaccines, not inactivated virus vaccines, in periodic outbreaks primarily outside the US and Europe (which do not use live-virus polio vaccines)
- hilbert42 4y agoWhilst the attenuated polio virus vaccine may carry a tiny risk it cannot be reasonably compared with the dangers of not being vaccinated. Anti-vaxxers and those who've not gotten around to being vaccinated should look very carefully at those photos especially the one with the rows of poor kids in iron lungs, it's so tragic I want to cry. I know, I lived through that 1950s/60s polio epidemic and whilst I was lucky and didn't get polio other kids at my school did. One died and another in my class ended up not being able to walk without calipers on his legs. It was terrible. I've since had both the Salk and Sabin vaccines, back then when the vaccines finally arrived everyone rushed to them (despite a few tragic mishaps with a bad batch of early vaccine). At that time the term 'anti-vaxxer' didn't exist - as the concept was almost inconceivable.
- cute_boi 4y agoWhile we are on it, if people dont know, CIA used polio vaccine to carry out secret operations creating distrust in vaccines.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CamelCaseName 4y agoIt was the CIA organizing a fake hepatitis vaccine drive in Pakistan to get the DNA of Bin Laden's children. As a result, there have been a number of targeted attacks on polio vaccination workers that continue to this day. [0] It is no surprise then, that as the grand parent comment mentions, this is the last region where polio exists. [0] https://www.voanews.com/a/attack-on-pakistan-anti-polio-team-kills-3-people-/6636145.html https://www.voanews.com/a/attack-on-pakistan-anti-polio-team...
- BurningFrog 4y agoWhy could they not use a real vaccine??
- PoignardAzur 4y agoThat's not the takeaway here. The takeaway is "military operations should never, ever use vaccination campaigns as a cover".
- BurningFrog 4y agoWe disagree. Many worse things have been done in military operations, and often rightly so. But giving thousands of innocent civilians fake vaccines when you could just as easily have given them real ones, is bafflingly needless cruelty.
- ars 4y agoThey did use a real vaccine. It was real in every way - except they also collected data.
- contingencies 4y agoChina definitely had a lot of polio in the early 20th through mid 20th century. There are still some young people (~late 20s) who were affected as children.
- WalterBright 4y agoTwo years ago I read an article that said a recent polio vaccination offered some crossover immunity (5%) against Covid, so I got re-vaccinated against polio. A friend of mine at Boeing told me he spent a year in an iron lung as a kid.
- lucb1e 4y ago> An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator (NPV), a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body, and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space, to stimulate breathing. Holy crap that sounds uncomfortable, I already hate the few mbar pressure difference between ground level and 6th floor, let alone doing that 30 times a minute (resting breathing rate: 12-15 breaths/minute -> switching from breathing in, to breathing out, means 2 pressure changes per breath). Surely there are more comfortable solutions to operating one's chest, something like shaving and a (number of) large suction cup(s) to operate the chest, perhaps aided by weak glue around the edges? Edit: "in which a person is laid, with their head protruding from a hole in the end of the cylinder" whew. Does make me wonder how to prevent hyperventilation (too high a rate) while providing enough oxygen at all times (like during stress or other exertion, resting rate may not be enough). > Positive pressure ventilation systems are now more common than negative pressure systems. Positive pressure ventilators work by blowing air into the patient's lungs via intubation through the airway [...] [this has] the advantage of not restricting patients' movements or caregivers' ability to examine the patients Doesn't sound that much better, as I've heard that intubation is its own kind of hell. (On intubation, Wikipedia just mentions "Patients are generally anesthetized beforehand.")
- hollerith 4y agoThe iron lung doesnt change the pressure of the air around your head, which is probably what you find uncomfortable.
- xupybd 4y agoThere is still someone living in one https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lung-paul-alexander-polio-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lu...
- WalterBright 4y agoBTW, polio is spread through poor bathroom hygiene.
- lucb1e 4y agoI wasn't sure what you meant, so I looked it up: "poor bathroom hygiene" is not like toilet seat wiping or other in-bathroom stuff, but rather about pathways that make trace amounts of someone else's feces end up in your mouth. > [Polio] is transmitted primarily via the fecal–oral route, by ingesting contaminated food or water. (--en.wikipedia.org/wiki/polio) This can take many forms, some obvious such as if someone doesn't wash their hands after using the toilet, shakes your hand, and you later eat something; others less obvious such as if someone poops into la Meuse in France and someone gets some water in their mouth in what is known as de Maas in the Netherlands. (Not sure how many pathogens survive French wastewater treatment or how many people swim in Maas-connected water bodies during hot weather, but you get the idea.) More info on this route at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal%E2%80%93oral_route https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal%E2%80%93oral_route
- est31 4y agoYou are not wrong that polio spreads through feces of infected individuals, your intestines are where it usually replicates. I might add though that in the 20th century counterintuitively it was the improvements in bathroom hygiene in the western world that have caused the high ratios of polio induced paralysis. Mostly because with really bad bathroom hygiene, even babies get infected with the virus, who still receive antibodies through their mother's milk and are protected by them. The immune system can deal with an infection and gain immunity in a safer environment. Now, in places with improved bathroom hygiene more children get exposed at later ages, like e.g. the toddler age. At that point, polio is way more dangerous as the immune system is not helped by the mother's antibodies. https://nextnature.net/story/2014/how-modern-sanitation-gave-us-polio https://nextnature.net/story/2014/how-modern-sanitation-gave...
- faangiq 4y agoCrazy. Did not know!
- m0llusk 4y agoThe 1 in 200 chance is an old statistic. Since that time obesity and Vitamin D deficiency have both increased along with various other measures of health. There is good reason to believe that modern people have immune systems that will be less effective against polio infections and negative outcomes.
- culi 4y agoMakes me wonder if we should be specifically engineering really weak but way more infectious strains of dangerous infectious diseases. Let them spread and outcompete the harmful strains