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It's incredibly contagious and it's incredibly hard to kill. It doesn't appear to occur at all in animals, so that's not the reservoir. It's just that if one pe

It's incredibly contagious and it's incredibly hard to kill. It doesn't appear to occur at all in animals, so that's not the reservoir. It's just that if one person has it, everyone around them will be infected if haven't either been vaccinated or already had it. We did a good job of eradicating smallpox which is viral, and diptheria and whooping cough are almost gone (they'll probably never totally go, bacterial diseases are like that), polio isn't really a thing. If you look at a graveyard from the beginning of the 20th century when they started recording such things on gravestones (and maybe a ways back into the 19th) you'll see a lot of children died very young - pretty much all of that was diptheria. And that brings me round to the last point - we're lucky because pretty much no-one dies or has life-changing aftereffects from measles. Diptheria killed just about everyone that caught it. Polio killed just about everyone that got it, or left them with crippling nerve damage. There are people alive today with disabilities caused by polio, and they were the lucky ones. So, while it was pretty horrible watching my beautiful little baby boy get stabbed in the legs, two at a time, to get it done quickly - but you don't get over the instinct to defend your child from someone hurting them easily - I'm glad he will never have any of a laundry list of preventable diseases, even the ones that just give you some itchy spots and a few days off school.

oldgradstudent 3y ago
> Polio killed just about everyone that got it, or left them with crippling nerve damage. That's simply not true. Polio is asymptomatic or a mild flu-like illness for the vast majority of people infected (still a major public health disaster). This is well known and, sadly, conclusively demonstrated during the Cutter Incident, where live virus was accidentally injected, due to a manufacturing defect. > The mistake produced 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained live polio virus. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a form of the disease that does not involve the central nervous system), 56 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  > Polio is asymptomatic or a mild flu-like illness for the vast majority of people infected (still a major public health disaster). Okay, yes, you're right. What I posted was an oversimplification. It's true that the vast majority of people who suffered significant complications of polio became very ill, and it was far far more common than measles complications.

oldgradstudent 3y ago

> Polio killed just about everyone that got it, or left them with crippling nerve damage. That's simply not true. Polio is asymptomatic or a mild flu-like illness for the vast majority of people infected (still a major public health disaster). This is well known and, sadly, conclusively demonstrated during the Cutter Incident, where live virus was accidentally injected, due to a manufacturing defect. > The mistake produced 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained live polio virus. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a form of the disease that does not involve the central nervous system), 56 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories

Gordonjcp 3y ago
> Polio is asymptomatic or a mild flu-like illness for the vast majority of people infected (still a major public health disaster). Okay, yes, you're right. What I posted was an oversimplification. It's true that the vast majority of people who suffered significant complications of polio became very ill, and it was far far more common than measles complications.