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"A problem" is a bit of an understatement... at this point it's basically caused the global polio eradication effort to fail. Wild type 2 poliovirus no longer e
by makomk 4y ago
"A problem" is a bit of an understatement... at this point it's basically caused the global polio eradication effort to fail. Wild type 2 poliovirus no longer exists anywhere in the world, and all infections with it over the last couple of decades are vaccine-derived. The original plan was that everywhere would switch to a bivalent oral vaccine without the type 2 virus, any remaining vaccine-derived outbreaks could be mopped up with monovalent vaccine, and then it would finally be eradicated for real. This failed - there were widespread outbreaks and targetted vaccination just caused the number of outbreaks to increase. The new oral vaccine was the fallback plan and the fact that this is already happening with it is not a great sign.
- b112 4y ago[flagged]
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoI personally believe that those qualities are orthogonal.
- brutusborn 4y agoAre you saying pharma execs would prefer a working product over a profitable one?
- makomk 4y agoEh, the oral polio vaccine is old, cheap, and kind of predates the rise of modern big pharma. Disease eradication is just a hard problem in general. The only human infectious disease that's been eradicated - smallpox - was a particularly easy target for various unique reasons, including the existence of a live vaccine that was incredible effective despite being so wildly different from the actual disease-causing virus that it couldn't easily cause serious disease in humans itself.
- rossdavidh 4y agoMaybe, but that kind of company probably aims its products at the First World customer.
- homonculus1 4y ago[dead]
- outworlder 4y agoWe have eradicated pathogens before...
- Izkata 4y agoTwo ever, one of which was a cat virus.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jjtheblunt 4y ago> Wild type 2 poliovirus no longer exists anywhere in the world… How do you prove that claim?
- makomk 4y agoIt's impossible to be 100% certain, but there's no animal reservoirs for polio that have ever been known to exist and it hasn't been seen in humans for a couple of decades now - if it was still in existence we'd probably know about it by know, given how infectious polio is. All of the recent outbreaks are either type 1 poliovirus (mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan) or have been linked to the vaccine via genetic testing.