Vaccines You Need After 50

Salk Produces Polio Vaccine

Salk produces polio vaccine1952

Poliomyelitis has been around since ancient times. There is still no cure for the disease. But at the peak of its devastation in the United States, Jonas Salk introduced a way to prevent it.

This infectious viral disease attacks the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous system, often causing muscle wasting and paralysis and even death. Since 1900 there had been cycles of epidemics, each seeming to get stronger and more disastrous. The disease, whose early symptoms are like the flu, struck mostly children, although adults, including Franklin Roosevelt, caught it too.

As a medical student and later a researcher at the University of Michigan, Salk studied viruses, such as influenza, and ways to vaccinate against them. Successful vaccines already existed for diseases such as smallpox. For each virus, a vaccine must be custom-made, but the principles are the same: if your body is exposed to a very weak or small amount of the disease virus, it will produce antibodies, chemicals to resist and kill the virus. Then when a full-strength version of the disease virus comes along, your body is prepared to fight it.

In 1947 Salk became head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He began investigating the poliovirus. To start with, he had to sort the 125 strains of the virus. He found that they fell into three basic types and knew that a vaccine would have to include these three types to protect against all polio. One of the hardest things about working with poliovirus was manufacturing enough to experiment with�and to make vaccine production practical.

In 1948 researchers at Harvard (J.F. Enders, T.H. Weller, and F.C. Robbins) made a breakthrough with this. They found that the virus could grow on scraps of tissue, without needing an intact organism like a chick embryo. Bacteria usually contaminated the tissue, but Enders' team was now able to get penicillin -- discovered 20 years earlier by Alexander Fleming and developed in the 1940s by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey -- and prevent the bacterial growth. Now viruses like mumps or polio could be created in large quantities for study. This team won the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine.

Now Salk could speed up his research. Using formaldehyde, he killed the polio virus but kept it intact enough to trigger the body's response. On July 2, 1952, Salk tried a refined vaccine on children who'd already had polio and recovered. After the vaccination, their antibodies increased. He then tried it on volunteers who had not had polio, including himself, his wife, and their children. The volunteers all produced antibodies, and none got sick.

In 1953 Salk reported his findings in The Journal of the American Medical Association. A nationwide testing of the vaccine was launched in April 1954 with the mass inoculation of school children. The results were amazing -- 60-70 percent prevention -- and Salk was praised to the skies. But suddenly, some 200 cases of the disease were caused by the vaccine and 11 people died. All testing was halted. It seemed that people's hopes were dashed until investigators found that the disease-causing vaccine all came from one poorly made batch at one drug company. Higher production standards were adopted and vaccinations resumed, with over 4 million given by August 1955. The impact was dramatic: In 1955 there were 28,985 cases of polio; in 1956, 14,647; in 1957, 5,894. By 1959, 90 other countries used Salk's vaccine.

Another researcher, Albert Sabin, didn't think Salk's killed-virus vaccine was strong enough. He wanted to mimic the real-life infection as much as possible; that meant using a weakened form of the live virus. He experimented with more than 9,000 monkeys and 100 chimpanzees before isolating a rare form of poliovirus that would reproduce in the intestinal tract but not in the central nervous system. In 1957 he was ready for human trials of an vaccine people could swallow, not get in a shot. It was tested in other countries, including the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1958 other researchers tested a strain in the U.S. And they tried to cast doubts on Sabin's "communist vaccine." In spite of this, his vaccine was licensed in 1962 and quickly became the vaccine of choice. It was cheaper to make and easier to take than Salk's injectable vaccine.

In the U.S., cases of polio are now extremely rare, and ironically, are almost always caused by the Sabin vaccine itself -- being live, the virus can mutate to a stronger form. Elsewhere there are still about 250,000 cases per year, mostly in developing nations where vaccination has not become widespread. The World Health Organization has goals to eradicate polio completely in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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New York Polio Update: Hundreds May Be Infected, Based On Wastewater Findings In 2 Counties

Wastewater samples suggest that the poliovirus, an RNA virus from Picornaviridae family that causes ... [+] polio disease, may be spreading in New York state. (Photo: Getty)

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What a waste. On Thursday, the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) announced that they had found poliovirus in wastewater samples from two counties, Orange County and Rockland County, in June and July. This water polio announcement came two weeks after the NYSDOH had announced on July 21 that an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County had gotten infected with the poliovirus and as a result became paralyzed. If you are wondering, "hmmm, polio, I don't get it," that's because the U.S. Was declared polio-free in 1979. That declaration came after years of public health efforts to get the U.S. Population vaccinated against this dangerous and potentially deadly virus. Yet, such reappearance of the poliovirus in New York raises more concerns that continuing anti-vaccination campaigns may be setting our country back many decades and laying to waste all the hard work that had gotten the U.S. Polio-free in the first place.

This Rockland County case was the first confirmed polio case in New York state since 1990 and the first confirmed one in all of the U.S. Since 2013. Those previous cases were travelers who had gotten infected abroad. Finding the virus in wastewater in various locations in two different New York state counties over two months makes this a more poopy situation in more ways than one. It suggests that people have been pooping out the virus for a while with an emphasis on the word "people," as in more than one person. It's probably unlikely that one person infected with the polio virus has been toilet hopping in New York state, running around using different random toilets in the two counties. According to the NYSDOH announcement, finding the virus now in three wastewater samples from Rockland County and four samples from Orange County provides "further evidence of local—not international—transmission of a polio virus that can cause paralysis and potential community spread." In other words, the virus could be spreading in the U.S. Once again. Oh, joy.

And here's another thing that may get you to fall off of your stool: there may be hundreds of people infected with the virus already. Yep, as you can see in the following tweet, New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett warned, "Based on earlier polio outbreaks, New Yorkers should know that for every one case of paralytic polio observed, there may be hundreds of other people infected":

This one-to-hundreds estimate comes from the observation that about 72 out of every hundred people who are infected with the virus won't end up having any visible symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And about 25 out of every hundred will only have two to five days of flu-like symptoms such as fever, sore throat, fatigue, nausea, headache, and stomach pain. You can imagine that most people having such flu-like symptoms won't automatically say, "OMG, I may have polio" and go see a doctor to get diagnosed.

You've heard the phrase "silent but deadly" when it comes to other gastrointestinal (GI) issues? Well, this is a virus that can inhabit your GI tract, spread silently among different people, and be deadly to some. Since the virus can be shed into your stool, it spreads primarily through the fecal-oral route, which is a fancy way of saying poop-to-mouth. If you claim that you don't typically put poop in your mouth, you'd be wrong, wrong like a bedroom gong. People are often pretty darn bad about washing their hands after making a deposit in the toilet. So when folks still have stool on their hands on the things that they touch, poop there is.

As you can see in the tweet above, Bassett continued by stating, "Coupled with the latest wastewater findings, the Department is treating the single case of polio as just the tip of the iceberg of much greater potential spread. As we learn more, what we do know is clear: the danger of polio is present in New York today." Just what you needed with the Covid-19 pandemic and the monkeypox outbreak, another infectious disease to be concerned about now.

With poliovirus, the biggest concern, of course, is the one out of hundred or so people who end up having very serious problems with their brain or spinal cord or both such as abnormal sensations, meningitis, or paralysis, which is weakness or the inability to move the arms, legs, or other parts of the body. Such problems can be life-threatening, especially when the paralysis affects muscles that help you move air in and out of your lungs. After all, breathing in such a manner is sort of important unless you happen to be a ficus plant.

Before you start loading up on supplements, ivermectin, or any bogus treatment that you think will help against polio, keep in mind that there is no cure for polio. The best protection against polio is to get the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), which can offer around 99% protection if you have gotten all four recommended doses. In theory, if you are or were a child in the U.S., you should have already gotten vaccinated against polio, because it is one of the required vaccinations for many school-aged children. Yet, as of August 1, 2022, the polio vaccination rate was only 60.34 percent in Rockland County and only 58.68 percent in Orange County, based on New York state records. Both of these were significantly lower than the statewide average of 78.96 percent. Gee, wonder why the case of paralytic polio happened to appear in Rockland County and poliovirus was found in both Rockland and Orange Counties?

Bassett urged everyone who hasn't been vaccinated against polio to do so:

The NYSDOH announcement included the following statement from Orange County Health Commissioner Irina Gelman MPH DPM, PhD as well: "It is concerning that polio, a disease that has been largely eradicated through vaccination, is now circulating in our community, especially given the low rates of vaccination for this debilitating disease in certain areas of our County. I urge all unvaccinated Orange County residents to get vaccinated as soon as medically feasible."

Concerning indeed. Getting the U.S. Polio-free in 1979 was a major public health achievement. As the CDC describes, in the late 1940s, each year, polio would leave on average more than 35,000 people disabled in the U.S., many of them children, and parents afraid of allowing their kids go outside, particularly during the summer when virus activity was highest. The development and roll-out of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) and IPV in the 1950s and 1960's changed all that. That's why people have been able to say the following: did you hear the joke about polio? It used to be killer, but no one gets it anymore. Well, now the joke is that people not getting polio vaccine threatens to reverse all the progress that was made. What a waste.

Cameroon Reports Polio After Central African State's Largest Inoculation Since 2020

Yaounde — 

Cameroon officials say a fifth case of polio was reported in the capital, Yaounde, this week, despite the launching of a new polio vaccination campaign in the central African country and its neighbors. Health officials are increasing surveillance and encouraging parents, many of whom still resist vaccination programs, to have their children inoculated.

Cameroon's health ministry says that five cases of type-2 poliovirus variants were discovered in the central African state's capital, Yaounde, this week.

The Cameroon government says sequencing results indicate the virus belongs to the NIE-ZAS-1 group that circulates in Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.

The five cases constitute a national public health emergency given the high risk of the virus spreading very fast in the ongoing rainy season, according to the government.

Alma Mpiki is a pediatrician at Cameroon's health ministry. She said to stop the spread of the disease as soon as possible the government of Cameroon has increased efforts to vaccinate all children under the age of five.

"There are still sporadic cases (of polio), that is why even though we are beginning to move towards the injectable form of the vaccines, we still continue to give the oral vaccination which is helpful and more efficient in protecting children," she said.

Alma said the government is sending caravans to markets and communities to ask civilians to make sure all children are vaccinated.

Poliomyelitis is a highly infectious disease that is caused when the polio virus invades the nervous system of an infected person. The World Health Organization says polio has no cure and can cause paralysis and even death.

The outbreak was reported three months after the launch of Africa's largest polio vaccination campaign since 2020.

Cameroon health officials say they joined the massive inoculation exercise to reach out to children whose parents were refusing to take the children to hospitals for inoculation because of fear of the coronavirus.

Tchockfe Shalom Ndoula is the permanent secretary of Cameroon's Expanded Vaccination Program.

Tchokfe said the inoculation exercise launched in May was a combined effort by Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic and Niger to immunize a total 21 million children under the age of five. He said before this week's outbreak in Cameroon, 14 type-2 poliovirus infections were detected in sub-Saharan African countries.

Tchocfe said one case was detected in Niger, six confirmed cases were reported in Chad, and seven more in the Central African Republic since January.

Cameron's health ministry says more than three million children in the country have been inoculated against polio since May.

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