17 ms·

Polio is on the brink of eradication

485 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

hilbert42 3y ago
As someone who lived through the polio epidemic during my childhood and having seen kids die of the disease or end up in iron lungs or having to wear calipers for life, I can only say hallelujah I hope this announcement about its likely eradication ends up being true.
- orra 3y ago
  Indeed, it'd be wonderful to see polio eradicated. Eradication has been a decades long program; they originally aimed to do it by the year 2000, then ?, then 2018. Even if the last stage of eradication is stubbornly slow, we have obviously been quite successful at limiting the number of cases.
  - alfredpawney 3y ago
    Honestly never thought i’d see the day.
  - smegger001 3y ago
    Well it didn't help when the CIA got caught posing as health workers giving out polio vaccination in Pakistan.
    - LordShredda 3y ago
      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... The taliban started attacking polio vaccine workers and the UN suspended operations. Polio exists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria
    - codezero 3y ago
      The scheme was for hepatitis vaccinations. The article linked below just mentions that only health workers giving polio vaccines had previously been able to access the compound.
    - jryle70 3y ago
      Why that certainly didn't help, the main reason has been misconception and religious belief: According to a study conducted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, respondents misconceived the vaccine to be capable of causing harm to the immune system (93%), triggering adverse reactions 97.5%, to be against their social and moral values (95%), and to be not as good as traditional methods for treating children 98.5% https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-28-2022/volume-28-issue-7/understanding-the-reasons-for-refusal-of-polio-vaccine-by-families-in-quetta-block-pakistan.html https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-28-2022/volume-28-issue...
      - honksillet 3y ago
        Pakistani parents have good reason to not trust anything administered by a needle. 700 children recently contracted HIV. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hundreds-of-children-in-pakistan-have-been-infected-with-hiv-used-needles-could-be-to-blame/2019/06/06/467aac92-86cf-11e9-9d73-e2ba6bbf1b9b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hundreds-o...
        freshpots 3y ago
        "Pakistani parents have good reason to not trust anything administered by a needle. 700 children recently contracted HIV." Is not a good rationale for making a decision. Parents, indeed anyone, shouldn't be worried about anything administered by a needle unless proper protocols are not followed, and they always should.
        austhrow743 3y ago
        They should pretend proper protocols are followed because proper protocols should be followed?
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        That's like saying the cure for cancer is not getting cancer.
        3y ago
    - pyuser583 3y ago
      Yeah there was an X-Files episode where the CIA gathered DNA via polio vaccines. Which means someone at the CIA said, “Hey that thing that happened in the X-Files, let’s do that but for real!”
      - smegger001 3y ago
        It doesn't inspire confidence when your spy agencies start stealing ideas from the villain spies who got caught in a TV show from the 90s
      - slavik81 3y ago
        Wasn't it the Smallpox Eradication Program?
        pyuser583 3y ago
        That may have been it! Spoiler: It was the one where Mulder finds his sister’s record, then tears off the name to see his own underneath. I doesn’t really matter though. The real world CIA vaccines were against Hepatitis B.
- gumby 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    >However his utterly evil attitude and actions have nothing to do with polio. You don't know that. Without looking into many alternate universes where he did not have polio, there's no way to know how having polio affected his mind, either biochemically or simply by affecting his experiences during his formative years in childhood. Remember the butterfly that causes a hurricane.
    - gumby 3y ago
      A shame a rigorous, controlled A/B test wouldn't be ethical, much less possible. What if it turned out to be possible to vaccinate against becoming a jerk?
      - shiroiuma 3y ago
        The problem is that there's infinite ways that someone having a disease like polio could change their actions and therefore the future, and not all outcomes are actually worse. Perhaps having polio makes some people into jerks, and for others it somehow makes them better. Perhaps having polio effectively neutralizes some people who would have caused great harm if they had stayed healthy. Imagine if Hitler had contracted polio and was stuck in an iron lung for most of his life: history would be very different. Perhaps one of the people who did get stuck in an iron lung would have been another Hitler. The possibilities are endless.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  I wasn’t familiar with the term calipers outside of the measuring tool. For anyone else wondering, it refers to the leg braces used by those who have polio induced nerve damage and subsequent muscle weakness (poliomyelitis).
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    >I wasn’t familiar with the term calipers outside of the measuring tool. It also refers to the part in disc brakes which holds the brake pads and squeezes them together onto the rotor.
- Clubber 3y ago
  Jonas Salk is one of my personal heroes. Probably the best and most selfless human I can think of. A true credit of and benefit to humanity. A stark contrast with most of today's innovators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Salk tried and failed to patent the polio vaccine because it was rejected by the USPTO as not being novel. He didn't choose not to patent the vaccine out of the goodness of his heart.
    - Aloha 3y ago
      This runs counter to every source I've read - do you have a source for it?
    - kaliumex 3y ago
      The patent was pursued by National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis who funded Salk's research. Salk himself wasn't much in favour of a patent, stating that his techniques weren’t novel and the work was built upon the research of others. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vaccine-20141028-column.html https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vacc...
      - pclmulqdq 3y ago
        All of those famous public statements by Salk occurred after his work was determined to be unpatentable by the funding agency. We don't really know what happened behind closed doors other than the normal university/nonprofit research process, which involves a lot of profiteering. The same thing happened with Sabin before that vaccine was also released without a patent (Sabin would have been a Soviet/Russian patent, so it's a slightly different system). The famous "could you patent the sun" quote was about obviousness, not about anything else.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  There's been a lot of progress, but sadly the GPEI is still at least a decade from eradication if they are agressive... and already starting to slow down. They really need one last push, and it's becoming clear that it's not going to come from Gates or the WHO. Dealing with vaccine-derived polio is going to be the big issue for the next decade, but projections suggest that type 1 polio will go out of control if OPV cessation happens on the desired timeline and the status quo is kept up until then. If Ken Griffin or Jim Simons (or any hedge fund guy) wants some extra karma or has beef with Bill Gates, this is probably an $X billion project in total, but it seems to need someone who can out-asshole Afghan warlords and is willing to crack a few skulls to get it done.
  - riffraff 3y ago
    > it's becoming clear that it's not going to come from Gates or the WHO. Wasn't the gates foundation a big promoter of this? I thought it was one of their main focuses.
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
      Publicly, the Gates foundation wants to take credit for polio eradication, but they never seem to want to actually spend the money on the things that are required for polio eradication. If you look at the modeling results, Gates and the WHO manage to do less than the minimum required to have a decent chance of "turning the corner," while also doing a lot of fun science projects like making a new version of OPV. Gates himself moves between a lot of different "current things" - it was polio 15 years ago, then it became malaria, and now it seems to be the climate (with a brief stopover on COVID).
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
  When I was a kid a friend of the family was a polio survivor. It definitely made an impression on me. Polio is truly horrific. Eradicating it will truly be one of humanity's great achievements.
- ridgeguy 3y ago
  We may be of a similar age cohort. I vividly recall my parents' mounting anxiety as three of our neighborhood kids were stricken and put in iron lungs. One died (age 4), two recovered (ages 5 & 6) after around 6 months in hospital. I've kept track of one - she's 74. In her 50s, she developed muscle degeneration as part of post-polio syndrome. Wrecked her ability to live independently. I got both the Salk and the later Sabin vaccine. That took a huge weight from my parents' spirit, improved our family dynamics. I'll track this story. I deeply hope for polio to follow smallpox into oblivion.
Mistletoe 3y ago
It’s amazing what vaccines can do when people take them and they aren’t politically weaponized by AI and social media algorithms. Sorry if I’m bitter, I just had a nurse tell me yesterday to not take the flu vaccine because she said it doesn’t prevent flu and why would I “put that junk in my body.”
- dotnet00 3y ago
  The polio vaccine is also clearly more effective at limiting the disease than the flu or covid vaccines (granted that this is in part just the nature of the virus).
  - philjohn 3y ago
    Indeed - from my understanding, they have to "guess"timate which strains of Flu will be prevalent in a given year, if they get it right, fantastic - if they get it wrong, lower effectiveness. Of course, it's not really a guess so much as an educated assessment. Having said that, as an asthmatic I've had the Flu vaccine every year for the last 20 or so years, and knock on wood haven't had Flu since. I also had the multivalent pneumonia vaccine a while ago, so fingers crossed!
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      TBH my last flu vaccine was something like 25 years ago (I am not antivax, I am just too lazy to get it) and I had "true" flu (not seasonal colds or covid) precisely once since then. My doctor friend doesn't get flu vaccine even when recommended, because, to quote her, "in my line of work, I was already exposed to everything ten times at least". She works as an ORL expert in a big hospital, so she is constantly staring down some sick throats.
      - lawlessone 3y ago
        I try to get them when I remember. There's more evidence , especially since Covid open peoples eyes, that colds , flus etc can have long term effects even after they are gone.
CodeWriter23 3y ago
https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/ https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/
tomohawk 3y ago
From the article, wild polio cases have been less than 50 per year for the past 3 years, but vaccine derived cases have been 300 - 900 per year. The details in the article as to why this is are interesting and alarming. It just shows that a lot can go wrong in this process and good intentions are not enough.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Well, during the 80's there were 300,000 to 400,000 cases worldwide per year[1], so I have a hard time seeing how this is bad thing. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/polio https://ourworldindata.org/polio
  - User23 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > those vaccine injuries If you’re vaccinated against polio, the vaccine-derived virus can’t harm you. The people being injured are by and large the unvaccinated.
      - gwervc 3y ago
        Circular logic. Vaccines can injure people, it's a fact. I've seen it first hand with a relative of mine get an hepatitis from a vaccine. Trying to silent that just foster conspiracy theories, because once trust is lost it's hard to rebuild. So better not lose it by hiding scientific and medical facts.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Vaccines can injure people Nobody said otherwise. What's being contested is the framing of those who are getting vaccine-derived polio as vaccine injured. They're not. They're side effects of the sterilizing polio vaccine. If they were vaccinated, they wouldn't have been injured. > silent that just foster conspiracy theories, because once trust is lost it's hard to rebuild Nobody is silencing anyone. We're in an era of the opposite of silencing. It's increasingly clear there is a psychographic or political profile that will not get vaccinated, facts be damned. I don't think they should be forced to. But they shouldn't be allowed into the healthcare profession, and they should be restricted from public spaces in healthcare crises. (Countries should also be free to restrict them from entry.)
dopylitty 3y ago
Polio virus isn’t close to eradication and people who work on it are coming to the conclusion that it probably never will be unless a different sort of vaccine is created. [0] Polio the disease caused by polio virus could be eradicated with widespread and continuous vaccination. The problem is the current vaccine used in most places around the world is an attenuated live virus vaccine. It gives the recipient immunity by infecting them with a strain that doesn’t cause disease in most people but is still able to replicate in the gut and spread to others and eventually reverts to being able to cause disease. So anyone who isn’t vaccinated can still get the reverted vaccine strain. The most common cause of polio outbreaks now is the vaccine strain. In rich countries they use an inactivated vaccine that works great against disease and can’t become virulent but is expensive, requires more infrastructure for delivery (needles etc), and doesn’t give enough immunity to prevent spreading the virus if infected. There are possible solutions to all of these problems but they require research and the eradication campaigners are making research more and more difficult by restricting which labs can work on polio research. The podcast TWiV is hosted by the guy who first figured out the Polio virus genome and they frequently discuss it. The episode below is about a new attenuated vaccine that was recently created with hopes of not reverting but even it has reverted in some small number of cases. 0: https://asm.org/podcasts/twiv/episodes/driven-to-immunodistraction-twiv-931 https://asm.org/podcasts/twiv/episodes/driven-to-immunodistr...
- deleted 3y ago
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- readams 3y ago
  All of that, and the strategies used to combat it (including a better oral vaccine), are described in detail in the article.
  - jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
    How dare you assume someone who didn’t read the article and then unknowingly posted contents from the article didn’t read the article lol
HorizonXP 3y ago
Apt. Took the kids for vaccinations this morning and was telling kiddo last night about how amazing vaccines are and how polio doesn’t exist anymore because of it. Sounds like I was technically wrong, but practically right. I also told him how amazing it is that when I was his age, I had the chickenpox, but that he will never get it because they developed a vaccine for it. None of this helped him today with not freaking out over getting a shot, but hey, I tried and I made it clear why I had to hold him down. Sometimes, irrational fears win. We’ll get there, he’s just a kid.
- gr2m 3y ago
  My kids are into superheros. We explained how vaccines are basically super powers! Now they are sad when they go to the doctor and don’t get one they also get all their friends and class mates pumped about vaccines which I take as a win
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    In a real sense, vaccinations are superpowers. Immunity from pestilence was historically taken, across cultures and for obvious reasons, as signs of divine influence.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  I had no idea there was a chicken pox vaccine. That’s awesome.
  - robocat 3y ago
    Even awesomer - the vaccine also helps prevent shingles - which many many people get after middleage. Brian is at high risk of shingles, and Logan isn't. https://xkcd.com/1950/ https://xkcd.com/1950/
- rmccue 3y ago
  I got the chickenpox vaccine as a kid, but still managed to pick it up a couple of years ago - efficacy wanes as you age apparently, and it had been over a decade since I’d been vaccinated. So, there’s still the possibility :D
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> Only one human disease has so far been declared eradicated: smallpox I was reading a post by someone, a few years ago, lamenting that we had “killed” a virus. I am not 100% sure they were being serious, but they gave every indication that they were. In any case, I’m sure that some bioweapons lab, somewhere (like, maybe, in Frederick, MD) has samples of the virus, “just in case it comes back.”
- nolok 3y ago
  Don't need to wonder, the US and Russian (Soviet at the time) have made it public that they keep samples of smallpox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    I’m old enough to have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm.
    - dghughes 3y ago
      I never got one since the doctor didn't like the look of a birthmark on my arm. I don't have that puffy scar. My sister got one though. Damn I just though I could have been a left arm bicep model.
  - ls612 3y ago
    Ostensibly this serves a purpose beyond the MAD incentive, having stocks of the virus on hand makes manufacturing the old style smallpox vaccine easier should the need ever arise in the future. As we saw with monkeypox last year there is much more limited capacity for more modern pox vaccines due to the more advanced manufacturing process and limited demand.
    - naravara 3y ago
      Someday soon we’ll just be able to sequence its genome and reconstruct it without needing to keep samples alive (and no longer have the risk with all the maintenance and security protocols that will entail). Of course however we store that genomic code had better be on physical media in a sealed vault that isn’t even within spitting distance of anything with an internet connection.
verisimi 3y ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Banning chemicals from food, eg ddt, surely helps No?
- huytersd 3y ago
  The hell are you talking about. This is a viral infection.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > how does one confirm any of it? Must one take pharmaceutical companies or their related organisations (WHO, Nature) at their word? No. But it takes some effort.
slackfan 3y ago
We've been on the brink of eradicating polio for something like 60 years. And then vaccine manufacturers across the world fuck up and cause an outbreak. This is one of those cases that I have no sympathy for the hype piece, no sympathy for "the science", or the pharma companies making bank off of keeping this thing rolling. Only sympathy goes out to the people hurt by polio and human idiocy.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > then vaccine manufacturers across the world fuck up and cause an outbreak What?
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    In recent decades, infection from vaccines based on the live virus, instead of the killed virus, has been a primary source of outbreaks. The usual mechanism: Someone who was never vaccinated changes the diaper of a child who has gotten the live vaccine, gets exposed, gets sick. Many years ago on Sixty Minutes, an elderly man who changed the diaper for his grandchild caught it and diagnosis and treatment was delayed because the doctor literally said something like "Decades ago, I would say this was polio. You have all the symptoms." and didn't consider that was possible because "we've eradicated it."
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      How is that vaccine manufacturers fucking up? Also, this is literally what this article is about. (And we use the non-sterilising, non-virus containing non-polio-producing IPV in the United States. So the unvaccinated can change babies’ diapers without fear.)
      - DoreenMichele 3y ago
        I'm not suggesting it is. But "What?" is hardly a rebuttal a la "That's not a fuck up." So I explained what I think the OP likely is referring to because you sounded to me like you had no idea what they meant.
cyberax 3y ago
DON'T JINX IT!!! I've been visiting https://polioeradication.org/ https://polioeradication.org/ over the years, and every time I get my hopes high, discover more polio cases or polio-positive samples are discovered :( They have a regularly updates summary: https://polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/weekly-polio-analyses-WPV-20231114.pdf https://polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/week... And the most recent case was on Oct 15 in Pakistan.
- mcstafford 3y ago
  I suspect science has had more to do with the reduction than superstitions like jinxes.
  - bendbro 3y ago
    I pray to god people let go of their superstitions.
    - mcstafford 3y ago
      :-) Delicious irony
  - kbenson 3y ago
    Some people play lip service to superstitions like this as a form of fun or a way to communicate feelings on a topic, and not necessarily because they believe the superstitions. For example, if I followed up a statement with "knock on wood" it wouldn't be because I believe it helps, or expect anyone to actually take that physical act (I probably won't unless to emphasize my feeling more), it's to convey I hope something succeeds or does not fail in a way that provides a lot of context in a small amount of words.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Jinxing means you hat people might consider the problem solved and pay less attention to it.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
Their imagined future resurgence scenario -- someone in a lab gets infected, then travels abroad -- highlights one of the reasons developed countries need to help less developed countries: Out of enlightened self interest, not "charity" nor "the goodness of their hearts." We currently are de facto breeding antibiotic resistant infections in places without adequate sanitation or water infrastructure and you can go from pretty much anywhere on the planet to pretty much anywhere else these days in 24 hours or less. When people from developed countries get sick while someplace else, they are often medevaced out to get them good care in a modern facility, thereby potentially exposing people in their country to whatever they have. We need to do a better job of providing basics like adequate water infrastructure worldwide if we want to be free from such diseases in our cushy developed countries.
- genman 3y ago
  We must collectively understand the reason why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development by large margin. You can make large investments and build everything for 1 million people, but after two decades there are now 2 million people and then 4 and then 8. Africa started out with 200 million people After the WW2 period. In the beginning of this century there were around 800 people. Now there are 1.5 billion people. The rate of population growth is just unbearable. And Africa is here just an example. The same problem affects also India and other places.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    Malawi is one of the countries mentioned in this article as a source of polio outbreaks. A famous singer has invested millions in hospitals there and they still lack adequate water infrastructure. I imagine their post operative stats are probably not great. Getting surgery in a modern hospital and going home to inadequate clean water and inadequate nutrition likely actively fosters post operative infections. Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society. My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that. We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.
piker 3y ago
My dad is a severe paralytic polio survivor and turns 70 next year. He’s a happy man, but his life has been hard in incomprehensible ways. As a father now, I cannot imagine what his parents went through when he was paralysed in the hospital at the age of 2. The world will be a better place without the fear of polio. Let us hope.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I wish we would also figure out how to fix people damaged in this fashion rather than accepting that you will just be maimed for life.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    What are you referring to peiple accepting? That polio has no cure, or that we we don't know how to cure paralysis due to nerve and motor neuron destruction? The former I think people accept because if we can eradicate it through vaccination then it's a problem solved, so we are working towards that. The latter I don't think anyone actually accepts, it's just a hard problem and progress is slow.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      You tend to hear mostly about research into repairing nerves damaged due to injury. It seems to me that a broken neck would be a harder thing to fix than neurons impaired by infection. It seems likely to me that if you can identify the nutrients depleted by the infection and also actually clear the infection from the body, this should be relatively easy to repair compared to something like a broken neck. I did a quick search ("are there any organizations working specifically on polio paralysis" on Bing) and most hits are about the news currently under discussion, not about research into treating the paralysis. I did find this page on The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation site: https://www.christopherreeve.org/todays-care/living-with-paralysis/health/causes-of-paralysis/post-polio-syndrome-poliomyelitis/ https://www.christopherreeve.org/todays-care/living-with-par... They indicate there are a lot of studies on Post Polio Syndrome, which is not per se research into treating paralysis. Some stats from the page: Over 12 million people, worldwide have been affected by polio as indicated by the CDC. There is no central system for reporting post-polio syndrome, but it is estimated that 300,000 individuals are survivors of polio in the United States and have mild to severe symptoms. Of the 300,000 survivors of polio, it is estimated that of one fourth to one half may develop some form of post-polio symptoms.
ryzvonusef 3y ago
I'm from Pakistan, and polio eradication has been frustrating to say the least. Polio teams workers still get killed regularly, and in fact, in searching for news on polio workers, discovered tragically that one worker was killed just today: https://twitter.com/TNNEnglish/status/1727695070906957889 https://twitter.com/TNNEnglish/status/1727695070906957889 and polio vaccination drives have been delayed in other areas too (separate from the unfortunate incident above) https://twitter.com/MajidBuhair/status/1727755867666452722 https://twitter.com/MajidBuhair/status/1727755867666452722 I mean what can I say of others, back in my own extended family, I have cousins who refused to vaccinate their kids at all, like no vaccine of any kind, and nothing I or anyone can say will change their mind. Thing is that they are not illiterate, they have been to schools, they are just.. stubborn. That means attack vectors exist in all directions. I personally discovered this the hard way when I randomly caught a case of mumps despite having been vaccinated as a child with the MMR vaccine (my dumbass doctor thought I had "mild-tonsillitis" and sent me home with antibiotics) Not sure where I caught it from but thankfully it was mild and I recovered after 10 days of absolute misery. But the moral of the story is, not only is polio unlikely to be eradicated, but even people like me who thought they were covered by vaccination from dutiful parents, are still vulnerable to all these diseases, either as patients or carriers. Our vaccination drives are not forming effective vaccine shields, and that means we have to think of treatment and not prevention as the "first" step of our fights against diseases. ____ > The result came back a month later: it was wild polio type 1, not seen in the continent since 2016. > Sequencing traced its origin to Pakistan, but also revealed that the virus had been circulating for two years undetected — possibly in Malawi, and possibly elsewhere. Because Malawi had no wastewater surveillance at the time, it was impossible to know. If we can re-introduce polio to a place where polio had been eradicated, then I fear one day the world will get frustrated just decide to quarantine us, and I wouldn't know who to blame.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  What I saw on Pakistani TV/newspapers was people complaining that government just wanted them to get tika (vaccination) but wouldn’t listen to them about anything else or fix any of their other problems (roads, schools, jobs)
- 3y ago
niemandhier 3y ago
Polio would likely be eradicated already, if not for a CIA op that used a vaccination program as a cover to get DNA from bin Laden. Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... As a result part of the Afghan and Pakistani population stopped believing in what WHO workers told them.
- actuallyalys 3y ago
  The CIA operation was definitely a setback for polio eradication and doubtless caused other harms to public health, but the article this thread is about discusses numerous challenges to eradication so I suspect even without the CIA campaign, we’d still be a ways away from eradication.
- ars 3y ago
  The CIA thing was bad, but absolutely not the cause of eradication failure. That's 100% becuause type 2 polio is REALLY good at mutating and changing the OPV version to an infectious version.
Animats 3y ago
Polio is coming back, a little.[1] There are two polio vaccines. One takes four injections, spaced months apart, and cannot cause polio because it doesn't contain an active virus. The other is a live-virus vaccine, as a pill, and has about a one in a million chance of causing polio. These are both 1950s technology. "For most people, (polio) has no symptoms. For about a quarter of people who get the polio virus, they will have mild symptoms that may include fever, gastroenteritis, upset stomach, aches, and so-on—in other words, flu-like symptoms. Most people would not know they have a polio infection because those symptoms are so common to many other infections." "Somewhere around one in 200 to one in 1000 people that get infected with the polio virus will develop poliomyelitis, which is also known as paralytic polio or acute flaccid paralysis but can also include presentations that are less and more severe, including delayed post-polio syndrome with mild disability or acute respiratory failure and death." Those who are not suffering still spread the disease. What happened when the anti-vaxxers reached Pakistan.[2] [1] https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/is-polio-making-a-comeback/ https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/is-polio-making-a-com... [2] https://archive.is/wJhkF https://archive.is/wJhkF
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Polio is coming back, a little This was a valid question in 2022. I don't think it's the case anymore in 2023. We seem to have eliminated it from the African continent. At this point, it's contained to Pakistan and Afghanistan. One of those is cooperating with vaccination efforts; the other is effectively quarantining itself.
- serial_dev 3y ago
  You mean the CIA reached Pakistan. > The CIA’s efforts to capture Osama bin Laden via a fake vaccination drive in Pakistan led to a rise in vaccine hesitancy in the years after the scheme was revealed. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-osama-bin-laden-fuelled-vaccine-hesitancy-in-pakistan/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-o...
SpaceManNabs 3y ago
That is great news. I sincerely hope we continue that trajectory. I am afraid at the uptick of recent antivaxxers but hopefully that is just temporary. I went to the ER recently and saw an orthodox jewish kid in a polio bed. I felt so sad for him. (This was in NYC).
MrDresden 3y ago
After seeing news about a rise in polio cases last year I immediately looked at my vaccinations. Turned out I was a few years overdue for a 10 year booster (which was immediately remedied).
scottLobster 3y ago
Don't worry, Rockland County NY will ensure it remains "on the Brink" indefinitely.
- arp242 3y ago
  Since I had no idea what this referred to: "the county has the largest Jewish population percentage of any U.S. county". So looks another "(((them))) in (((control)))" bollocks.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Its probably about a particular subculture within the Orthodox Jewish community in that county that leads to certain environments (notably, private schools in that community) having vaccination rates persistently below the level needed to prevent outbreaks of several diseases that are controlled by vaccination otherwise, not about any kind of deliberate plan or other conspiracy theory, antisemitic or otherwise. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/why-measles-hits-so-hard-within-n-y-orthodox-jewish-community/ https://kffhealthnews.org/news/why-measles-hits-so-hard-with...
  - scottLobster 3y ago
    Rockland County recently had an unvaccinated man paralyzed by polio, despite the disease supposedly being eliminated from the US in 1979. https://www.chop.edu/news/2022-ny-polio-case-why-and-what-does-it-mean https://www.chop.edu/news/2022-ny-polio-case-why-and-what-do... There's a large concentration of ultra-orthodox Jews living there that don't vaccinate for anything on religious grounds. As a result the county is notorious for essentially being a living archive of otherwise eliminated diseases, in particular they have outsized issues with any disease that could be dealt with through vaccination. All of this is on the first page of google search results for "Rockland County polio", but thanks for not doing even that much and jumping straight to "hmm, lots of jews live there, this guy must be a neonazi!".
    - arp242 3y ago
      > All of this is on the first page of google search results for "Rockland County polio", but thanks for not doing even that much and jumping straight to "hmm, lots of jews live there, this guy must be a neonazi!". I look up "Rockland County"; I see a bunch of things that specifically mention it being Jewish. So okay, what am I supposed to assume on a topic that 1) has nothing to do with Jews, but which 2) has a long history of conspiracy theories attached to it, which sometimes includes Jews (because all conspiracy theories do)? I did not think of a list of search queries I could possibly do in order to find some obscure event I didn't know existed. If you don't want people making assumptions then try being less vague in your references to some obscure little-known non-obvious event, because "making assumptions" is pretty much the only think anyone can do with a cryptic comment like that unless they're already aware of what you're on about.
fabiofzero 3y ago
[flagged]
londons_explore 3y ago
Unfortunately, I believe the vaccine-type cases won't be eliminated for decades or maybe centuries... Stopping vaccinating populations with oral polio vaccine tends to make cases trend upwards, and the only fix for that I suspect is to change over to injectable vaccines for a whole generation of people (ie. 50 years).
raincom 3y ago
First polio cases linked to new oral vaccine detected in Africa: https://www.science.org/content/article/first-polio-cases-linked-new-oral-vaccine-detected-africa https://www.science.org/content/article/first-polio-cases-li...
Obscurity4340 3y ago
What about the scourge of forced/economic-imperative based labor and social murder?
deleted 3y ago
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riffraff 3y ago
I feel like I've been reading optimistic articles about this for many years and it seems the last 1% of the work is still elusive. Look at the chart in TFA: 2022 is in line with 2017. Still: there is progress, even the current numbers are already incredibly low. This is already a story of success, even if the "brink" is still a bit off.
sam_goody 3y ago
Slightly OT: A kid once told me that when he was about 8 he went to visit his grandparents, who live in the desert. He played outside, alone, for awhile. When he returned, he had an odd mark on his arm. His grandparents told him it needed immediate attention, and brought him to the hospital. The guard who inspected their car at the hospital parking, told them not to leave the car and to keep the windows up. Within a few minutes, several men in "Corona suits" escorted them all into a closed room, and left them for a few hours. The docs then came and told the child and his grandad, that the marks looked liked the bubonic plague, and so they immediately quarantined them. The fact that they are both alive and healthy three hours later, implies that it is something else, so they will now get regular treatment. I have no way of verifying the story but I imagine it is true (though perhaps not recalled 100%, he was 8 at the time). It reminded me just how close we really could be to having another worldwide plague.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  If you are talking about the desert of the American Southwest, sounds like a tale (whether real or made up) about hantavirus.
jinpa_zangpo 3y ago
To viruses and bacteria the human body is like a buffet table. If one virus is eliminated, another virus will evolve to take its place. Already we have acute flaccid paralysis, a disease with the symptoms of polio that is not caused by the polio virus. Although we can celebrate our successes, we shouldn't imagine we can eliminate all childhood diseases through vaccination programs.
inemesitaffia 3y ago
What about Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria?
Marykat12 3y ago
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Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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485 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

As someone who lived through the polio epidemic during my childhood and having seen kids die of the disease or end up in iron lungs or having to wear calipers for life, I can only say hallelujah I hope this announcement about its likely eradication ends up being true.

orra 3y ago
Indeed, it'd be wonderful to see polio eradicated. Eradication has been a decades long program; they originally aimed to do it by the year 2000, then ?, then 2018. Even if the last stage of eradication is stubbornly slow, we have obviously been quite successful at limiting the number of cases.
- alfredpawney 3y ago
  Honestly never thought i’d see the day.
- smegger001 3y ago
  Well it didn't help when the CIA got caught posing as health workers giving out polio vaccination in Pakistan.
  - LordShredda 3y ago
    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... The taliban started attacking polio vaccine workers and the UN suspended operations. Polio exists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria
  - codezero 3y ago
    The scheme was for hepatitis vaccinations. The article linked below just mentions that only health workers giving polio vaccines had previously been able to access the compound.
  - jryle70 3y ago
    Why that certainly didn't help, the main reason has been misconception and religious belief: According to a study conducted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, respondents misconceived the vaccine to be capable of causing harm to the immune system (93%), triggering adverse reactions 97.5%, to be against their social and moral values (95%), and to be not as good as traditional methods for treating children 98.5% https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-28-2022/volume-28-issue-7/understanding-the-reasons-for-refusal-of-polio-vaccine-by-families-in-quetta-block-pakistan.html https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-28-2022/volume-28-issue...
    - honksillet 3y ago
      Pakistani parents have good reason to not trust anything administered by a needle. 700 children recently contracted HIV. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hundreds-of-children-in-pakistan-have-been-infected-with-hiv-used-needles-could-be-to-blame/2019/06/06/467aac92-86cf-11e9-9d73-e2ba6bbf1b9b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hundreds-o...
      - freshpots 3y ago
        "Pakistani parents have good reason to not trust anything administered by a needle. 700 children recently contracted HIV." Is not a good rationale for making a decision. Parents, indeed anyone, shouldn't be worried about anything administered by a needle unless proper protocols are not followed, and they always should.
        austhrow743 3y ago
        They should pretend proper protocols are followed because proper protocols should be followed?
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        That's like saying the cure for cancer is not getting cancer.
        3y ago
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    Yeah there was an X-Files episode where the CIA gathered DNA via polio vaccines. Which means someone at the CIA said, “Hey that thing that happened in the X-Files, let’s do that but for real!”
    - smegger001 3y ago
      It doesn't inspire confidence when your spy agencies start stealing ideas from the villain spies who got caught in a TV show from the 90s
    - slavik81 3y ago
      Wasn't it the Smallpox Eradication Program?
      - pyuser583 3y ago
        That may have been it! Spoiler: It was the one where Mulder finds his sister’s record, then tears off the name to see his own underneath. I doesn’t really matter though. The real world CIA vaccines were against Hepatitis B.
gumby 3y ago
[flagged]
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >However his utterly evil attitude and actions have nothing to do with polio. You don't know that. Without looking into many alternate universes where he did not have polio, there's no way to know how having polio affected his mind, either biochemically or simply by affecting his experiences during his formative years in childhood. Remember the butterfly that causes a hurricane.
  - gumby 3y ago
    A shame a rigorous, controlled A/B test wouldn't be ethical, much less possible. What if it turned out to be possible to vaccinate against becoming a jerk?
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      The problem is that there's infinite ways that someone having a disease like polio could change their actions and therefore the future, and not all outcomes are actually worse. Perhaps having polio makes some people into jerks, and for others it somehow makes them better. Perhaps having polio effectively neutralizes some people who would have caused great harm if they had stayed healthy. Imagine if Hitler had contracted polio and was stuck in an iron lung for most of his life: history would be very different. Perhaps one of the people who did get stuck in an iron lung would have been another Hitler. The possibilities are endless.
Modified3019 3y ago
I wasn’t familiar with the term calipers outside of the measuring tool. For anyone else wondering, it refers to the leg braces used by those who have polio induced nerve damage and subsequent muscle weakness (poliomyelitis).
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >I wasn’t familiar with the term calipers outside of the measuring tool. It also refers to the part in disc brakes which holds the brake pads and squeezes them together onto the rotor.
Clubber 3y ago
Jonas Salk is one of my personal heroes. Probably the best and most selfless human I can think of. A true credit of and benefit to humanity. A stark contrast with most of today's innovators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Salk tried and failed to patent the polio vaccine because it was rejected by the USPTO as not being novel. He didn't choose not to patent the vaccine out of the goodness of his heart.
  - Aloha 3y ago
    This runs counter to every source I've read - do you have a source for it?
  - kaliumex 3y ago
    The patent was pursued by National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis who funded Salk's research. Salk himself wasn't much in favour of a patent, stating that his techniques weren’t novel and the work was built upon the research of others. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vaccine-20141028-column.html https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vacc...
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
      All of those famous public statements by Salk occurred after his work was determined to be unpatentable by the funding agency. We don't really know what happened behind closed doors other than the normal university/nonprofit research process, which involves a lot of profiteering. The same thing happened with Sabin before that vaccine was also released without a patent (Sabin would have been a Soviet/Russian patent, so it's a slightly different system). The famous "could you patent the sun" quote was about obviousness, not about anything else.
pclmulqdq 3y ago
There's been a lot of progress, but sadly the GPEI is still at least a decade from eradication if they are agressive... and already starting to slow down. They really need one last push, and it's becoming clear that it's not going to come from Gates or the WHO. Dealing with vaccine-derived polio is going to be the big issue for the next decade, but projections suggest that type 1 polio will go out of control if OPV cessation happens on the desired timeline and the status quo is kept up until then. If Ken Griffin or Jim Simons (or any hedge fund guy) wants some extra karma or has beef with Bill Gates, this is probably an $X billion project in total, but it seems to need someone who can out-asshole Afghan warlords and is willing to crack a few skulls to get it done.
- riffraff 3y ago
  > it's becoming clear that it's not going to come from Gates or the WHO. Wasn't the gates foundation a big promoter of this? I thought it was one of their main focuses.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Publicly, the Gates foundation wants to take credit for polio eradication, but they never seem to want to actually spend the money on the things that are required for polio eradication. If you look at the modeling results, Gates and the WHO manage to do less than the minimum required to have a decent chance of "turning the corner," while also doing a lot of fun science projects like making a new version of OPV. Gates himself moves between a lot of different "current things" - it was polio 15 years ago, then it became malaria, and now it seems to be the climate (with a brief stopover on COVID).
jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
When I was a kid a friend of the family was a polio survivor. It definitely made an impression on me. Polio is truly horrific. Eradicating it will truly be one of humanity's great achievements.
ridgeguy 3y ago
We may be of a similar age cohort. I vividly recall my parents' mounting anxiety as three of our neighborhood kids were stricken and put in iron lungs. One died (age 4), two recovered (ages 5 & 6) after around 6 months in hospital. I've kept track of one - she's 74. In her 50s, she developed muscle degeneration as part of post-polio syndrome. Wrecked her ability to live independently. I got both the Salk and the later Sabin vaccine. That took a huge weight from my parents' spirit, improved our family dynamics. I'll track this story. I deeply hope for polio to follow smallpox into oblivion.

Mistletoe 3y ago

It’s amazing what vaccines can do when people take them and they aren’t politically weaponized by AI and social media algorithms. Sorry if I’m bitter, I just had a nurse tell me yesterday to not take the flu vaccine because she said it doesn’t prevent flu and why would I “put that junk in my body.”

dotnet00 3y ago
The polio vaccine is also clearly more effective at limiting the disease than the flu or covid vaccines (granted that this is in part just the nature of the virus).
- philjohn 3y ago
  Indeed - from my understanding, they have to "guess"timate which strains of Flu will be prevalent in a given year, if they get it right, fantastic - if they get it wrong, lower effectiveness. Of course, it's not really a guess so much as an educated assessment. Having said that, as an asthmatic I've had the Flu vaccine every year for the last 20 or so years, and knock on wood haven't had Flu since. I also had the multivalent pneumonia vaccine a while ago, so fingers crossed!
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    TBH my last flu vaccine was something like 25 years ago (I am not antivax, I am just too lazy to get it) and I had "true" flu (not seasonal colds or covid) precisely once since then. My doctor friend doesn't get flu vaccine even when recommended, because, to quote her, "in my line of work, I was already exposed to everything ten times at least". She works as an ORL expert in a big hospital, so she is constantly staring down some sick throats.
    - lawlessone 3y ago
      I try to get them when I remember. There's more evidence , especially since Covid open peoples eyes, that colds , flus etc can have long term effects even after they are gone.

CodeWriter23 3y ago

https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/ https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/

tomohawk 3y ago

From the article, wild polio cases have been less than 50 per year for the past 3 years, but vaccine derived cases have been 300 - 900 per year. The details in the article as to why this is are interesting and alarming. It just shows that a lot can go wrong in this process and good intentions are not enough.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Well, during the 80's there were 300,000 to 400,000 cases worldwide per year[1], so I have a hard time seeing how this is bad thing. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/polio https://ourworldindata.org/polio
- User23 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > those vaccine injuries If you’re vaccinated against polio, the vaccine-derived virus can’t harm you. The people being injured are by and large the unvaccinated.
    - gwervc 3y ago
      Circular logic. Vaccines can injure people, it's a fact. I've seen it first hand with a relative of mine get an hepatitis from a vaccine. Trying to silent that just foster conspiracy theories, because once trust is lost it's hard to rebuild. So better not lose it by hiding scientific and medical facts.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Vaccines can injure people Nobody said otherwise. What's being contested is the framing of those who are getting vaccine-derived polio as vaccine injured. They're not. They're side effects of the sterilizing polio vaccine. If they were vaccinated, they wouldn't have been injured. > silent that just foster conspiracy theories, because once trust is lost it's hard to rebuild Nobody is silencing anyone. We're in an era of the opposite of silencing. It's increasingly clear there is a psychographic or political profile that will not get vaccinated, facts be damned. I don't think they should be forced to. But they shouldn't be allowed into the healthcare profession, and they should be restricted from public spaces in healthcare crises. (Countries should also be free to restrict them from entry.)

dopylitty 3y ago

Polio virus isn’t close to eradication and people who work on it are coming to the conclusion that it probably never will be unless a different sort of vaccine is created. [0] Polio the disease caused by polio virus could be eradicated with widespread and continuous vaccination. The problem is the current vaccine used in most places around the world is an attenuated live virus vaccine. It gives the recipient immunity by infecting them with a strain that doesn’t cause disease in most people but is still able to replicate in the gut and spread to others and eventually reverts to being able to cause disease. So anyone who isn’t vaccinated can still get the reverted vaccine strain. The most common cause of polio outbreaks now is the vaccine strain. In rich countries they use an inactivated vaccine that works great against disease and can’t become virulent but is expensive, requires more infrastructure for delivery (needles etc), and doesn’t give enough immunity to prevent spreading the virus if infected. There are possible solutions to all of these problems but they require research and the eradication campaigners are making research more and more difficult by restricting which labs can work on polio research. The podcast TWiV is hosted by the guy who first figured out the Polio virus genome and they frequently discuss it. The episode below is about a new attenuated vaccine that was recently created with hopes of not reverting but even it has reverted in some small number of cases. 0: https://asm.org/podcasts/twiv/episodes/driven-to-immunodistraction-twiv-931 https://asm.org/podcasts/twiv/episodes/driven-to-immunodistr...

deleted 3y ago
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readams 3y ago
All of that, and the strategies used to combat it (including a better oral vaccine), are described in detail in the article.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
  How dare you assume someone who didn’t read the article and then unknowingly posted contents from the article didn’t read the article lol

HorizonXP 3y ago

Apt. Took the kids for vaccinations this morning and was telling kiddo last night about how amazing vaccines are and how polio doesn’t exist anymore because of it. Sounds like I was technically wrong, but practically right. I also told him how amazing it is that when I was his age, I had the chickenpox, but that he will never get it because they developed a vaccine for it. None of this helped him today with not freaking out over getting a shot, but hey, I tried and I made it clear why I had to hold him down. Sometimes, irrational fears win. We’ll get there, he’s just a kid.

gr2m 3y ago
My kids are into superheros. We explained how vaccines are basically super powers! Now they are sad when they go to the doctor and don’t get one they also get all their friends and class mates pumped about vaccines which I take as a win
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  In a real sense, vaccinations are superpowers. Immunity from pestilence was historically taken, across cultures and for obvious reasons, as signs of divine influence.
Modified3019 3y ago
I had no idea there was a chicken pox vaccine. That’s awesome.
- robocat 3y ago
  Even awesomer - the vaccine also helps prevent shingles - which many many people get after middleage. Brian is at high risk of shingles, and Logan isn't. https://xkcd.com/1950/ https://xkcd.com/1950/
rmccue 3y ago
I got the chickenpox vaccine as a kid, but still managed to pick it up a couple of years ago - efficacy wanes as you age apparently, and it had been over a decade since I’d been vaccinated. So, there’s still the possibility :D

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> Only one human disease has so far been declared eradicated: smallpox I was reading a post by someone, a few years ago, lamenting that we had “killed” a virus. I am not 100% sure they were being serious, but they gave every indication that they were. In any case, I’m sure that some bioweapons lab, somewhere (like, maybe, in Frederick, MD) has samples of the virus, “just in case it comes back.”

nolok 3y ago
Don't need to wonder, the US and Russian (Soviet at the time) have made it public that they keep samples of smallpox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I’m old enough to have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm.
  - dghughes 3y ago
    I never got one since the doctor didn't like the look of a birthmark on my arm. I don't have that puffy scar. My sister got one though. Damn I just though I could have been a left arm bicep model.
- ls612 3y ago
  Ostensibly this serves a purpose beyond the MAD incentive, having stocks of the virus on hand makes manufacturing the old style smallpox vaccine easier should the need ever arise in the future. As we saw with monkeypox last year there is much more limited capacity for more modern pox vaccines due to the more advanced manufacturing process and limited demand.
  - naravara 3y ago
    Someday soon we’ll just be able to sequence its genome and reconstruct it without needing to keep samples alive (and no longer have the risk with all the maintenance and security protocols that will entail). Of course however we store that genomic code had better be on physical media in a sealed vault that isn’t even within spitting distance of anything with an internet connection.

verisimi 3y ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Banning chemicals from food, eg ddt, surely helps No?
huytersd 3y ago
The hell are you talking about. This is a viral infection.
- verisimi 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > how does one confirm any of it? Must one take pharmaceutical companies or their related organisations (WHO, Nature) at their word? No. But it takes some effort.

slackfan 3y ago

We've been on the brink of eradicating polio for something like 60 years. And then vaccine manufacturers across the world fuck up and cause an outbreak. This is one of those cases that I have no sympathy for the hype piece, no sympathy for "the science", or the pharma companies making bank off of keeping this thing rolling. Only sympathy goes out to the people hurt by polio and human idiocy.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> then vaccine manufacturers across the world fuck up and cause an outbreak What?
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  In recent decades, infection from vaccines based on the live virus, instead of the killed virus, has been a primary source of outbreaks. The usual mechanism: Someone who was never vaccinated changes the diaper of a child who has gotten the live vaccine, gets exposed, gets sick. Many years ago on Sixty Minutes, an elderly man who changed the diaper for his grandchild caught it and diagnosis and treatment was delayed because the doctor literally said something like "Decades ago, I would say this was polio. You have all the symptoms." and didn't consider that was possible because "we've eradicated it."
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    How is that vaccine manufacturers fucking up? Also, this is literally what this article is about. (And we use the non-sterilising, non-virus containing non-polio-producing IPV in the United States. So the unvaccinated can change babies’ diapers without fear.)
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      I'm not suggesting it is. But "What?" is hardly a rebuttal a la "That's not a fuck up." So I explained what I think the OP likely is referring to because you sounded to me like you had no idea what they meant.

cyberax 3y ago

DON'T JINX IT!!! I've been visiting https://polioeradication.org/ https://polioeradication.org/ over the years, and every time I get my hopes high, discover more polio cases or polio-positive samples are discovered :( They have a regularly updates summary: https://polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/weekly-polio-analyses-WPV-20231114.pdf https://polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/week... And the most recent case was on Oct 15 in Pakistan.

mcstafford 3y ago
I suspect science has had more to do with the reduction than superstitions like jinxes.
- bendbro 3y ago
  I pray to god people let go of their superstitions.
  - mcstafford 3y ago
    :-) Delicious irony
- kbenson 3y ago
  Some people play lip service to superstitions like this as a form of fun or a way to communicate feelings on a topic, and not necessarily because they believe the superstitions. For example, if I followed up a statement with "knock on wood" it wouldn't be because I believe it helps, or expect anyone to actually take that physical act (I probably won't unless to emphasize my feeling more), it's to convey I hope something succeeds or does not fail in a way that provides a lot of context in a small amount of words.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Jinxing means you hat people might consider the problem solved and pay less attention to it.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

Their imagined future resurgence scenario -- someone in a lab gets infected, then travels abroad -- highlights one of the reasons developed countries need to help less developed countries: Out of enlightened self interest, not "charity" nor "the goodness of their hearts." We currently are de facto breeding antibiotic resistant infections in places without adequate sanitation or water infrastructure and you can go from pretty much anywhere on the planet to pretty much anywhere else these days in 24 hours or less. When people from developed countries get sick while someplace else, they are often medevaced out to get them good care in a modern facility, thereby potentially exposing people in their country to whatever they have. We need to do a better job of providing basics like adequate water infrastructure worldwide if we want to be free from such diseases in our cushy developed countries.

genman 3y ago
We must collectively understand the reason why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development by large margin. You can make large investments and build everything for 1 million people, but after two decades there are now 2 million people and then 4 and then 8. Africa started out with 200 million people After the WW2 period. In the beginning of this century there were around 800 people. Now there are 1.5 billion people. The rate of population growth is just unbearable. And Africa is here just an example. The same problem affects also India and other places.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Malawi is one of the countries mentioned in this article as a source of polio outbreaks. A famous singer has invested millions in hospitals there and they still lack adequate water infrastructure. I imagine their post operative stats are probably not great. Getting surgery in a modern hospital and going home to inadequate clean water and inadequate nutrition likely actively fosters post operative infections. Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society. My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that. We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.

piker 3y ago

My dad is a severe paralytic polio survivor and turns 70 next year. He’s a happy man, but his life has been hard in incomprehensible ways. As a father now, I cannot imagine what his parents went through when he was paralysed in the hospital at the age of 2. The world will be a better place without the fear of polio. Let us hope.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I wish we would also figure out how to fix people damaged in this fashion rather than accepting that you will just be maimed for life.
- kbenson 3y ago
  What are you referring to peiple accepting? That polio has no cure, or that we we don't know how to cure paralysis due to nerve and motor neuron destruction? The former I think people accept because if we can eradicate it through vaccination then it's a problem solved, so we are working towards that. The latter I don't think anyone actually accepts, it's just a hard problem and progress is slow.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    You tend to hear mostly about research into repairing nerves damaged due to injury. It seems to me that a broken neck would be a harder thing to fix than neurons impaired by infection. It seems likely to me that if you can identify the nutrients depleted by the infection and also actually clear the infection from the body, this should be relatively easy to repair compared to something like a broken neck. I did a quick search ("are there any organizations working specifically on polio paralysis" on Bing) and most hits are about the news currently under discussion, not about research into treating the paralysis. I did find this page on The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation site: https://www.christopherreeve.org/todays-care/living-with-paralysis/health/causes-of-paralysis/post-polio-syndrome-poliomyelitis/ https://www.christopherreeve.org/todays-care/living-with-par... They indicate there are a lot of studies on Post Polio Syndrome, which is not per se research into treating paralysis. Some stats from the page: Over 12 million people, worldwide have been affected by polio as indicated by the CDC. There is no central system for reporting post-polio syndrome, but it is estimated that 300,000 individuals are survivors of polio in the United States and have mild to severe symptoms. Of the 300,000 survivors of polio, it is estimated that of one fourth to one half may develop some form of post-polio symptoms.

ryzvonusef 3y ago

I'm from Pakistan, and polio eradication has been frustrating to say the least. Polio teams workers still get killed regularly, and in fact, in searching for news on polio workers, discovered tragically that one worker was killed just today: https://twitter.com/TNNEnglish/status/1727695070906957889 https://twitter.com/TNNEnglish/status/1727695070906957889 and polio vaccination drives have been delayed in other areas too (separate from the unfortunate incident above) https://twitter.com/MajidBuhair/status/1727755867666452722 https://twitter.com/MajidBuhair/status/1727755867666452722 I mean what can I say of others, back in my own extended family, I have cousins who refused to vaccinate their kids at all, like no vaccine of any kind, and nothing I or anyone can say will change their mind. Thing is that they are not illiterate, they have been to schools, they are just.. stubborn. That means attack vectors exist in all directions. I personally discovered this the hard way when I randomly caught a case of mumps despite having been vaccinated as a child with the MMR vaccine (my dumbass doctor thought I had "mild-tonsillitis" and sent me home with antibiotics) Not sure where I caught it from but thankfully it was mild and I recovered after 10 days of absolute misery. But the moral of the story is, not only is polio unlikely to be eradicated, but even people like me who thought they were covered by vaccination from dutiful parents, are still vulnerable to all these diseases, either as patients or carriers. Our vaccination drives are not forming effective vaccine shields, and that means we have to think of treatment and not prevention as the "first" step of our fights against diseases. ____ > The result came back a month later: it was wild polio type 1, not seen in the continent since 2016. > Sequencing traced its origin to Pakistan, but also revealed that the virus had been circulating for two years undetected — possibly in Malawi, and possibly elsewhere. Because Malawi had no wastewater surveillance at the time, it was impossible to know. If we can re-introduce polio to a place where polio had been eradicated, then I fear one day the world will get frustrated just decide to quarantine us, and I wouldn't know who to blame.

selimthegrim 3y ago
What I saw on Pakistani TV/newspapers was people complaining that government just wanted them to get tika (vaccination) but wouldn’t listen to them about anything else or fix any of their other problems (roads, schools, jobs)
3y ago

niemandhier 3y ago

Polio would likely be eradicated already, if not for a CIA op that used a vaccination program as a cover to get DNA from bin Laden. Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... As a result part of the Afghan and Pakistani population stopped believing in what WHO workers told them.

actuallyalys 3y ago
The CIA operation was definitely a setback for polio eradication and doubtless caused other harms to public health, but the article this thread is about discusses numerous challenges to eradication so I suspect even without the CIA campaign, we’d still be a ways away from eradication.
ars 3y ago
The CIA thing was bad, but absolutely not the cause of eradication failure. That's 100% becuause type 2 polio is REALLY good at mutating and changing the OPV version to an infectious version.

Animats 3y ago

Polio is coming back, a little.[1] There are two polio vaccines. One takes four injections, spaced months apart, and cannot cause polio because it doesn't contain an active virus. The other is a live-virus vaccine, as a pill, and has about a one in a million chance of causing polio. These are both 1950s technology. "For most people, (polio) has no symptoms. For about a quarter of people who get the polio virus, they will have mild symptoms that may include fever, gastroenteritis, upset stomach, aches, and so-on—in other words, flu-like symptoms. Most people would not know they have a polio infection because those symptoms are so common to many other infections." "Somewhere around one in 200 to one in 1000 people that get infected with the polio virus will develop poliomyelitis, which is also known as paralytic polio or acute flaccid paralysis but can also include presentations that are less and more severe, including delayed post-polio syndrome with mild disability or acute respiratory failure and death." Those who are not suffering still spread the disease. What happened when the anti-vaxxers reached Pakistan.[2] [1] https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/is-polio-making-a-comeback/ https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/is-polio-making-a-com... [2] https://archive.is/wJhkF https://archive.is/wJhkF

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Polio is coming back, a little This was a valid question in 2022. I don't think it's the case anymore in 2023. We seem to have eliminated it from the African continent. At this point, it's contained to Pakistan and Afghanistan. One of those is cooperating with vaccination efforts; the other is effectively quarantining itself.
serial_dev 3y ago
You mean the CIA reached Pakistan. > The CIA’s efforts to capture Osama bin Laden via a fake vaccination drive in Pakistan led to a rise in vaccine hesitancy in the years after the scheme was revealed. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-osama-bin-laden-fuelled-vaccine-hesitancy-in-pakistan/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-o...

SpaceManNabs 3y ago

That is great news. I sincerely hope we continue that trajectory. I am afraid at the uptick of recent antivaxxers but hopefully that is just temporary. I went to the ER recently and saw an orthodox jewish kid in a polio bed. I felt so sad for him. (This was in NYC).

MrDresden 3y ago

After seeing news about a rise in polio cases last year I immediately looked at my vaccinations. Turned out I was a few years overdue for a 10 year booster (which was immediately remedied).

scottLobster 3y ago

Don't worry, Rockland County NY will ensure it remains "on the Brink" indefinitely.

arp242 3y ago
Since I had no idea what this referred to: "the county has the largest Jewish population percentage of any U.S. county". So looks another "(((them))) in (((control)))" bollocks.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Its probably about a particular subculture within the Orthodox Jewish community in that county that leads to certain environments (notably, private schools in that community) having vaccination rates persistently below the level needed to prevent outbreaks of several diseases that are controlled by vaccination otherwise, not about any kind of deliberate plan or other conspiracy theory, antisemitic or otherwise. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/why-measles-hits-so-hard-within-n-y-orthodox-jewish-community/ https://kffhealthnews.org/news/why-measles-hits-so-hard-with...
- scottLobster 3y ago
  Rockland County recently had an unvaccinated man paralyzed by polio, despite the disease supposedly being eliminated from the US in 1979. https://www.chop.edu/news/2022-ny-polio-case-why-and-what-does-it-mean https://www.chop.edu/news/2022-ny-polio-case-why-and-what-do... There's a large concentration of ultra-orthodox Jews living there that don't vaccinate for anything on religious grounds. As a result the county is notorious for essentially being a living archive of otherwise eliminated diseases, in particular they have outsized issues with any disease that could be dealt with through vaccination. All of this is on the first page of google search results for "Rockland County polio", but thanks for not doing even that much and jumping straight to "hmm, lots of jews live there, this guy must be a neonazi!".
  - arp242 3y ago
    > All of this is on the first page of google search results for "Rockland County polio", but thanks for not doing even that much and jumping straight to "hmm, lots of jews live there, this guy must be a neonazi!". I look up "Rockland County"; I see a bunch of things that specifically mention it being Jewish. So okay, what am I supposed to assume on a topic that 1) has nothing to do with Jews, but which 2) has a long history of conspiracy theories attached to it, which sometimes includes Jews (because all conspiracy theories do)? I did not think of a list of search queries I could possibly do in order to find some obscure event I didn't know existed. If you don't want people making assumptions then try being less vague in your references to some obscure little-known non-obvious event, because "making assumptions" is pretty much the only think anyone can do with a cryptic comment like that unless they're already aware of what you're on about.

fabiofzero 3y ago

[flagged]

londons_explore 3y ago

Unfortunately, I believe the vaccine-type cases won't be eliminated for decades or maybe centuries... Stopping vaccinating populations with oral polio vaccine tends to make cases trend upwards, and the only fix for that I suspect is to change over to injectable vaccines for a whole generation of people (ie. 50 years).

raincom 3y ago

First polio cases linked to new oral vaccine detected in Africa: https://www.science.org/content/article/first-polio-cases-linked-new-oral-vaccine-detected-africa https://www.science.org/content/article/first-polio-cases-li...

Obscurity4340 3y ago

What about the scourge of forced/economic-imperative based labor and social murder?

deleted 3y ago

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riffraff 3y ago

I feel like I've been reading optimistic articles about this for many years and it seems the last 1% of the work is still elusive. Look at the chart in TFA: 2022 is in line with 2017. Still: there is progress, even the current numbers are already incredibly low. This is already a story of success, even if the "brink" is still a bit off.

sam_goody 3y ago

Slightly OT: A kid once told me that when he was about 8 he went to visit his grandparents, who live in the desert. He played outside, alone, for awhile. When he returned, he had an odd mark on his arm. His grandparents told him it needed immediate attention, and brought him to the hospital. The guard who inspected their car at the hospital parking, told them not to leave the car and to keep the windows up. Within a few minutes, several men in "Corona suits" escorted them all into a closed room, and left them for a few hours. The docs then came and told the child and his grandad, that the marks looked liked the bubonic plague, and so they immediately quarantined them. The fact that they are both alive and healthy three hours later, implies that it is something else, so they will now get regular treatment. I have no way of verifying the story but I imagine it is true (though perhaps not recalled 100%, he was 8 at the time). It reminded me just how close we really could be to having another worldwide plague.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
If you are talking about the desert of the American Southwest, sounds like a tale (whether real or made up) about hantavirus.

jinpa_zangpo 3y ago

To viruses and bacteria the human body is like a buffet table. If one virus is eliminated, another virus will evolve to take its place. Already we have acute flaccid paralysis, a disease with the symptoms of polio that is not caused by the polio virus. Although we can celebrate our successes, we shouldn't imagine we can eliminate all childhood diseases through vaccination programs.

inemesitaffia 3y ago

What about Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria?

Marykat12 3y ago

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Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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