OBWOGO: Polio Vaccine Has Saved 18 Million People From Physical Disability (PART I: VACCINES SAVE LIVES)

VACCINES have played a major role in preventing death and reducing human suffering and misery and my mind boggles at the level of anti-vaccination attitudes today targetted at SARS-CoV-2 that causes Covid-19. At its peak in the 1940s and 50s, poliovirus would paralyse or kill over half a million people worldwide every year.

Back then, one of the greatest fears as a parent was your child contracting polio. The fear wasn’t just about getting paralysed and crippled as was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fate— you felt a pain in the back or a headache and, twelve hours later, you’d be fighting for dear life in an iron lung and experiencing a toothache-like pain all over the body. About five to 10 per cent of the children would be consigned for life in an iron lung, a type of ventillator that encased a child’s body to ease breathing (see below).

Although cases of polio had been documented for centuries— paralysis of the lower extremities— major epidemics didn’t occur until the early 20th century. The1916 epidemic saw over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States alone. It was typical then to publish daily in the newspapers the names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases, and their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined.

You see, polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus that invades the nervous system, and it can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. It’s transmitted from person-to-person mainly through the faecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (for example, contaminated water or food) and multiplies in the intestine. Initial symptoms are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness of the neck and pain in the limbs.

The disease mainly affects children under five years of age. According to the World Health Organisation, one in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis (usually in the legs). Among those paralysed, five to 10 per cent die when their breathing muscles become immobilised.

The DTAP shot most children get today covers diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough, called acellular pertussis) and polio. It’s estimated that more than 18 million people who are able to walk today, who would otherwise have been paralysed without the polio vaccine discovered by US scientist, Dr Jonas Salk in the 1950s. Another 1.5 million childhood deaths have been prevented, through the systematic administration of vitamin A during polio immunisation activities.

Cases due to wild poliovirus have decreased by over 99 per cent from 350,000 to 33 between 1988 and 2018. There are three known strains. Type 2 was declared eliminated in 2015 after the last case was detected in India in 1999. Type 3 wild polio virus, the last case of which was seen in Nigeria in 2012, was declared eradicated in 2019. Type 1, the only wild strain left, circulates only in Pakistan and Afghanistan (see below).

Misinformation about polio vaccines and a form of paralysis caused by mutant vaccine viruses that have been reported in some countries hinder full eradication of the disease. In many Muslim countries, false rumours linking vaccination to a Western plot to sterilise Muslim girls have left millions unvaccinated.

?Second, of the two polio vaccines required to stop outbreaks, fears of the oral version — contains weakened virus that would not cause disease and provides better protection— which has mutated into a form that can be passed on in diapers and sewage and can paralyse unvaccinated children, has led to its shunning. The injectable vaccine contains killed virus that cannot mutate (see below).

As long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of contracting polio. Failure to eradicate polio from these last remaining strongholds could result in as many as 200,000 new cases every year, within 10 years, all over the world. In most countries, the global effort has expanded capacities to tackle other infectious diseases by building effective surveillance and immunisation systems.

Dr Subiri Obwogo is a medical doctor, specialist in public health medicine and independent consultant in health policy and systems strengthening. He’s also the author of two books and several publications.