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Followers of Zerospinzone know that I've been following the worldwide effort to eradicate polio, a disease that killed or paralyzed 350,000 children per year not long ago. Since the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was launched in 1988, polio has been wiped out in country after country and continent after continent. The wild polio virus now hangs on in only a few countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
The good news is that in the first month of 2019 exactly zero cases of polio were reported. Not a single child fell ill with this once terrifying and deadly scourge. What a great achievement!
This doesn't yet mean that the virus has been completely eradicated. It may still lurk undetected in a few countries, and there's a very small but real risk that the attenuated virus used for oral inoculations can mutate in some individuals and cause cases of the disease. This complicates the polio end-game, during which at-risk populations may need to receive injections of a vaccine that uses killed virus particles, a costlier and more difficult undertaking.
However, this month with no polio cases tells us that the decades-long worldwide campaign to eradicate polio is closing in on its goal.
The apparently growing number of parents who are choosing not to have their children vaccinated might give a moment's thought to the 1950s, when polio paralyzed 15,000 children per year in the U.S. alone, and smallpox disfigured or killed an estimated 50 million people every year. A massive, worldwide effort similar to the current battle to eradicate polio succeeded brilliantly; the last case of smallpox occurred in 1979. Had anti-vaccination sentiment and propaganda been as strong then as now, millions of people would have been disfigured, paralyzed, or would have died needlessly.
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Seventy people, most of them children, have died from measles in the Philippines just in the past month. Every one of those deaths was preventable.
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The good news is that in the first month of 2019 exactly zero cases of polio were reported. Not a single child fell ill with this once terrifying and deadly scourge. What a great achievement!
 |
| Polio virus--it may soon exist only in a few super-secure laboratories |
However, this month with no polio cases tells us that the decades-long worldwide campaign to eradicate polio is closing in on its goal.
The apparently growing number of parents who are choosing not to have their children vaccinated might give a moment's thought to the 1950s, when polio paralyzed 15,000 children per year in the U.S. alone, and smallpox disfigured or killed an estimated 50 million people every year. A massive, worldwide effort similar to the current battle to eradicate polio succeeded brilliantly; the last case of smallpox occurred in 1979. Had anti-vaccination sentiment and propaganda been as strong then as now, millions of people would have been disfigured, paralyzed, or would have died needlessly.
-----
Seventy people, most of them children, have died from measles in the Philippines just in the past month. Every one of those deaths was preventable.
-----
If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for email alerts or to follow zerospinzone.
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