5 ms·

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 f

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.

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.