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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
by 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...
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- readams 3y agoAll of that, and the strategies used to combat it (including a better oral vaccine), are described in detail in the article.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y agoHow 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 agoIf it helps with the pain of downvotes, I appreciated your sarcasm.
- dopylitty 3y agoBoth the headline and the article imply that eradication is possible. Being "on the brink" even makes it sound inevitable. But eradicating the virus probably isn't possible and I think it's important for people who only read headlines and comments to understand that and why it's the case.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> eradicating the virus probably isn't possible Every domains expert disagrees. That most people get the non-sterilizing IPV is not a secret. Switching from the sterilizing, but virus-producing OPV to the non-sterilizing, but non-spreading (and more expensive) IPV is a well-run playbook. Yes, it means when an unvaccinated nutter from Brooklyn gets polio in Europe [1] that it spreads--inefficiently and without further consequence--through the vaccinated population. But those are edge cases which are diminishing in frequency as we switch from OPV to IPV on the periphery. First we eradicate the wild type. Then we eradicate the weaker vaccine-derived virus. It's a simple, precedented and achievable playbook. All we have to do is keep vaccinating (and keep our poop water away from our drinking water). [1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/21/health/new-york-polio/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/21/health/new-york-polio/index.h...