Polio: Old Disease, New Fears

Polio. The polio vaccine is something that we tend to think of only in the past, a difficult disease, but one that we don’t often see anymore. However, I have been surprised in my reading at the measures that are continuing to be taken in order to ensure that polio does not threaten any more people. The polio disease is a part of the Picornaviridae family and is an RNA virus, according to a recent review article. It is mainly transmitted by the fecal-oral route, and the disease is still running rampant in certain countries including Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to another article by The Journal of Infectious Diseases. I was not aware of the fact that the disease was still endemic in these places, but with the proper care, polio could be eradicated from the globe forever.

Since the 1960s, the OPV (oral polio vaccine) was the more commonly used vaccine in order to protect people from polio as opposed to the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). The OPV had the three different strains of the virus, which then protected patients against all three and allowed them to build up their immune systems. However, it was recently discovered that the OPV which has all three strains also has the danger to cause vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis or vaccine-derived polioviruses. A new OPV which only codes for the first and third strand of the virus because it is the second strand that has the potential to cause these other damaging effects. If only given this new OPV, there still remains the potential danger of the second strand to cause disease.

In order to protect patients from this second strand of the polio virus, scientists have been working to use the IPV again in order to combat this disease. IPV is able to help protect individuals from the second strain of the disease without the damaging side effects. It is still important for an individual to receive the modified OPV in order that they are protected from strains 1 and 2. All of this research into the polio vaccine greatly surprised me. As stated earlier, I did not realize the extent to which the polio virus is continuing to cause disease around the world. Thanks to the work of these scientists however, I do not think it will be much longer until polio is eradicated for good.