Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Entire World is Getting a New Polio Vaccine This Month
The Entire World is Getting a New Polio Vaccine This Month
Posted Fri, 04/15/2016
In the final push to end polio, global health planners are embarking on an unthinkably ambitious and potentially risky move. They’re switching 155 countries—a good portion of the world—from one polio vaccine to another.
This will require moving millions of doses of a new vaccine into place over the course of two weeks in late April, while sequestering the remaining stocks of the old one.
And that’s only one of the many maneuvers necessary to truly end polio, which in the 1980s caused more than 350,000 cases of paralysis a year. So far in 2016, there have been only nine cases in two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The vaccine switch is part of the final strategy to put a noose around the few remaining cases, by improving the match between the viruses that remain in the wild and the vaccine that suppresses them. If it goes as planned, it will improve children’s immunity to wild-type polio while removing their vulnerability to a variant of the disease that can be accidentally caused by the vaccine itself.
It looks like the goal is in sight. But polio has slipped from control before.
~~~ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/15/the-entire-world-is-getting-a-new-polio-vaccine-this-month/
Posted Fri, 04/15/2016
In the final push to end polio, global health planners are embarking on an unthinkably ambitious and potentially risky move. They’re switching 155 countries—a good portion of the world—from one polio vaccine to another.
This will require moving millions of doses of a new vaccine into place over the course of two weeks in late April, while sequestering the remaining stocks of the old one.
And that’s only one of the many maneuvers necessary to truly end polio, which in the 1980s caused more than 350,000 cases of paralysis a year. So far in 2016, there have been only nine cases in two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The vaccine switch is part of the final strategy to put a noose around the few remaining cases, by improving the match between the viruses that remain in the wild and the vaccine that suppresses them. If it goes as planned, it will improve children’s immunity to wild-type polio while removing their vulnerability to a variant of the disease that can be accidentally caused by the vaccine itself.
It looks like the goal is in sight. But polio has slipped from control before.
~~~ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/15/the-entire-world-is-getting-a-new-polio-vaccine-this-month/