The discovery of the polio virus in the sewage of New York and London caused panic in health circles around the world, with the World Health Organization saying that “one infected child” is a danger to all children in the world.
Polio is a terrible disease in every sense. There is no effective treatment for it, and the only way to prevent it is through vaccination against the virus that causes it.
Since the world came up with the polio vaccine some 70 years ago, the dreaded disease has already disappeared, or nearly so, so what has brought it back?
But before answering this question and the story’s relationship with the Corona epidemic, let’s go back a little to the pages of the past, when polio terrified parents all over the world, in the first half of the last century.
Polio mainly affects young children under the age of five and is often asymptomatic, but can also cause symptoms such as fever and vomiting.
One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis, and up to 10% of these patients die.
For the first time in decades, polio appears to be spreading in the British capital, London, New York City and Jerusalem. This led to calls for a greater focus on vaccination campaigns to prevent the deadly disease, which cripples tens of thousands of children each year.
There is no cure for polio, but polio has been completely preventable since a vaccine was discovered in the 1950s. Globally, the original virus has almost disappeared.
Currently, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries where this highly contagious disease, which is transmitted mainly through contact with “baby feces”, is prevalent.
But this year, imported cases were also detected in Malawi and Mozambique, the first in those countries since the 1990s, according to Reuters.
There are two main types of poliovirus. In addition to the main type, there are also rare cases known as vaccine-induced polio.
It is the second form identified in the sewage of the British capital, London, and in New York, in the United States, with one case of paralysis in New York State.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative said a virus with similar genetic characteristics has also been found in Jerusalem, and scientists are working to understand the connection between them.
While vaccine-induced polio is almost unheard of in the places mentioned above, it is a known but rare threat in other countries, causing outbreaks every year, including 415 cases in Nigeria in 2021. .
This second type is caused by the use of an oral polio vaccine that contains a live attenuated virus. After children are vaccinated, the virus remains in their stool for several weeks.
In communities where vaccination rates are low, this type of virus can spread and turn into a harmful version again.
While countries including the United Kingdom and the United States no longer use the live-virus vaccine, others do, experts say, particularly to prevent the spread of the disease, which allows for global spread. Especially when people started traveling again. coronavirus
Source: Lebanon Debate
