Polio Vaccine

If you are like me, you are familiar with polio and know that it is a serious, life-threatening disease, but you do not know all of the details. Before jumping into this blog post, I though it would be useful refer to the CDC website to cover some of the basics of polio before jumping into the vaccine. Most people who are infected with poliovirus will not develop any symptoms, and most of the people who do will develop flu-like symptoms. However, a smaller portion of people infected with poliovirus will develop serious symptoms such as paresthesia, meningitis, and paralysis that affect the brain and spinal cord. Poliovirus is spread through person-to-person contact, most commonly through the fecal-oral route. Poliovirus is highly infectious, but luckily, it is preventable by vaccine.

              According to a scholarly article, there are 2 vaccines that have been developed against poliovirus: inactivated poliovirus (IPV) and live oral poliovirus (OPV). The OPV vaccine is associated with a risk of causing paralysis in the recipient, and it scares me that many people around the world are taking this risk when there is a safer option available. In fact, more people develop paralysis from the vaccine than the wild poliovirus in today’s world, which is shocking to me. The inactivated poliovirus, on the other hand, does not pose these risks to the recipient. To combat the prevalence of vaccine-associated paralysis while still providing effective protection against poliovirus, the WHO suggests that and IPV is administered prior to the OPV. Since poliovirus has a human only reservoir, it is important for us to find a safer way to effectively prevent the spread of poliovirus, because we could theoretically eradicate polio.

              I found a recent article on Time that discussed a recent event involving the polio vaccine that I found to be quite interesting. In Pakistan, healthcare workers will occasionally campaign against polio and vaccinate as many people as possible to try to eliminate polio in their country. However, the Taliban believes that these campaigns and vaccination are Western conspiracies aimed at sterilizing Pakistani children. Last week, a police officer who was escorting healthcare workers to provide the vaccines was killed when the van he was travelling in was bombed. It is concerning to me that people do not realize the lifesaving effects that this vaccine has, and they are preventing their children from having important protection. Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are the only countries where polio in still endemic, so it is important to educate and help the people living in these countries.