- James Gallagher
- Health and science correspondent
A man with an iron lung
Previously, polio was one of the most terrifying diseases of children as it can attack the nervous system, thus causing a person to become paralyzed within a few hours, because it leads to paralysis of the chest muscles, making the person unable to breathe.
The coffin-like iron lung, which uses a bellows to keep the patient breathing, was a common sight on polio hospital wards, but it all feels like a long-forgotten era, and for good reason.
The disease was almost completely wiped out, with the last case of natural polio in the UK in 1984.
But talk of the disease returned with force after it paralyzed a young man in the United States, and in London, one million children are urgently vaccinated.
Since vaccines were developed in the early 1950s, the disease has been completely eliminated in Britain.
The World Health Organization says that without vaccines, 20 million people who can walk today would have polio.
The disease has been overcome and the problem has been reduced from being global in the 1980s to being confined to only two countries today.
Remarkably, Africa was declared polio-free in 2020.
But although Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only countries where polio is common, this endemic disease remains a threat to the rest of the world for two reasons.
First, these two countries can become a source of transmission of the disease to other places. The first case of polio in Africa was reported more than five years ago in a three-year-old girl in Malawi.
The infection was from the same strain found in Pakistan and it is not known how the disease got there.
In February, Malawi had to declare an outbreak of polio.
Second, the vaccine used in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in the face of other outbreaks, could create a problem in itself. This is now affecting the UK and other countries.
photo released, AFP
Oral polio vaccine is used to treat outbreaks
The most effective vaccine is drops of the weakened but live virus, given orally.
It is cheap, easy to use and leads to good immunity, which makes it ideal in response to disease outbreaks.
But the vaccine causes a stomach infection, so the virus is in people’s stool and can be transmitted to others.
This may be beneficial because it indirectly immunizes others.
But when it passes from one person to another, it can mutate, and it can even cause paralysis again, and this is known as vaccine-induced poliovirus.
Sewer – London
The oral vaccine has been a huge success, but this ability to return to its more dangerous form is why countries are aiming to move to the intravenous vaccine once they are free of polio.
The UK has been using syringes since 2004.
What is now emerging in the Sewers of London is a virus that has resulted from the use of the oral vaccine elsewhere in the world.
Some samples show signs of regaining the ability to cause polio, and genetic analyzes indicate that the virus is in the process of spreading.
It is also directly related to samples found in wastewater in the United States and Israel.
low rates
For fully immunized people, there are virtually no risks involved.
But the risk of paralysis in unvaccinated people ranges from one in 100 people to one in every 1,000 people, depending on the age of the person.
In general, the UK has high rates of vaccination, but there are pockets where very few have had vaccinations.
In most parts of the capital, 15 percent do not receive the three doses of the vaccine in the first year of their life.
In some neighborhoods, this percentage rises to nearly 40 percent.
These low rates are one possible explanation for the spread of the virus.
devastating efforts
Polio sounds like a disease of the past, but the virus in London and the paralysis found in the United States are an especially loud call to each one of us and our governments to be vigilant in the face of this disease and we may squander the progress we have made.
Scientific advances should make a difference, for example, a new, more stable version of the oral vaccine is unlikely to cause vaccine-induced paralysis.
But in the end, polio must be treated in the last two endemic countries in the world, or else the risk of an outbreak will always exist.
This is a challenge not only related to science or money, but also politics and society.
The United States has come under fire for squandering efforts to stop polio in Pakistan by resorting to a bogus vaccination program while trying to find former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
We are close to eradicating this disease and have been at this point for a long time.
The disease poses a diminishing threat, but it cannot be guaranteed that it will not spread here unless we eradicate it everywhere.