"Final push" against polio agreed

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3398503.stm

Mass immunisation campaigns that aim to vaccinate 250 million children against polio have been announced following an emergency meeting at the World Health Organisation.

After discussions, representatives from the six remaining polio endemic countries committed their governments to eradicating the virus by the end of this year.


(emphasis mine)

Draw your eyes away from the primary freakshows and take heed, children. This is Important News: one of the classic scourges of mankind is getting wiped off the face of the planet. Again.

Not all is dark.

Muslim clerics had been telling people that polio shots made women sterile and it was all a plot by the west against Islam...

Ignorance is still our greatest enemy.

I've met plenty of people here in the USA who are afraid that getting their infants vaccinated against dyptheria, pertussis, tetanus, etc. will make them autistic. I can't say for sure their concern is unjustified, but if enough people decide their own interests outweigh their responsibility to society to stop terrible diseases we will once again start seeing outbreaks of illnesses we thought were conquered once and for all.

BTW my mom had pertussis as a child. It almost killed her.

My arms and legs swelled up badly and I almost had to go to the hospital... So I've got a good excuse to skip that one.

I have no problem with a few people here and there eschewing vaccinations for medical reasons or even religious ones, but if too many opt out they set the stage for an epidemic.

Glad to hear you got through your ordeal OK.

:toast:

If a high-enough proportion of people are vaccinated, some free-riders can be accommodated. Even for school vaccinations, many states allow religious objections -- or, as in my state, 'philosophical' objections. If the vaccination level falls too low, however, that luxury will not be affordable. But where a vaccination is medically counterindicated -- that is an entirely different issue.

Do you know what you are allergic to? All three, just one of them, or to the medium used, so perhaps to others as well? For example, someone with a wound might want a tetanus shot, but not D or P.

Which leaves the D and the P... :)

Which leaves the D and the P... :)

Try just on this board. Plenty of anti-immunization websites out there that have just enough information to run with and declare immunization one of the greatest threats - yes, threats - to public health ever. Unfortunately they also push a giant conspiracy between all the governments of the world and the pharmaceutical companies.

In fact, I wouldn't be too surprised if a couple of them sniff out this thread to warn us about the millions of totally unreported illnesses and deaths due to vaccinations.

And I am not in a position to dispute any claims that vaccinations can cause complications.

But I'd bet a pint of Guinness none of the anti-vaccination folks have ever personally seen what diptheria or smallpox can do to a person.

Then they demand you prove that there aren't " millions of totally unreported illnesses and deaths due to vaccinations." So you have to explain the logical impossibility of proof in that, and boggle minds all around. I once posed the question as (in response to "you can't prove God doesn't exist") "Can you prove the tooth fairy doesn't exist?" ~sigh~

:hi:
We sure had some fun on those threads, didn't we? :eyes:

I am sad to say that there are some even among public health students.

of the virus. Not that polio would make a good biological weapon, like say, smallpox would, but if we learned anything from recent times, once a disease is eradicated, NO ONE, not even the US, should keep the virus alive in a lab somewhere. It's too easy to lose track of, and once the world's populations are no longer vaccinated, everyone will be susceptible to the disease again.

You never know if a variant or related virus will be found, and studying the polio virus might lead to ways to fight the new pathogen.

Except obvious spam. The genome of a virus can be thought of as an archive of data.

we find out who kept some virus to make weapons. No, polio doesn't act as fast as some, like smallpox; but that doesn't mean that someone won't want to fiddle with whatever's nasty.

Still, just as with smallpox, the big victory is wiping it out of the wild, if not from weapons labs.

making the point of whether laboratory stocks should be destroyed or not rather moot. here's how:

Chemical Synthesis of Poliovirus cDNA: Generation of Infectious Virus in the Absence of Natural Template
Jeronimo Cello, Aniko V. Paul, Eckard Wimmer*

Full-length poliovirus complementary DNA (cDNA) was synthesized by assembling oligonucleotides of plus and minus strand polarity. The synthetic poliovirus cDNA was transcribed by RNA polymerase into viral RNA, which translated and replicated in a cell-free extract, resulting in the de novo synthesis of infectious poliovirus. Experiments in tissue culture using neutralizing antibodies and CD155 receptor-specific antibodies and neurovirulence tests in CD155 transgenic mice confirmed that the synthetic virus had biochemical and pathogenic characteristics of poliovirus. Our results show that it is possible to synthesize an infectious agent by in vitro chemical-biochemical means solely by following instructions from a written sequence.

Originally published in Science Express as 10.1126/science.1072266 on July 11, 2002
Science, Vol. 297, Issue 5583, 1016-1018, August 9, 2002

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/297/5583/1016

Does this link into the research of commandeering viruses to target & fight cancer cells and infections?

they thought it'd be a cool thing to do, but then stirred up a hornet's nest of protests about how they were aiding and abetting terrorists, and seekers of wmds, and all that. in retrospect, it was all quite ironic, considering that if they had just consulted a biologist, they would have been told that viruses aren't even considered to be "life forms" or alive. in the end, they just ended up looking like a bunch of doofuses!!

in the end, they just ended up looking like a bunch of doofuses!!

Not sure I agree with "doofuses." They showed that you can create a nasty virus ex nihlio and recapitulate its biological activity. Theoretically the same could be done with other nasty viruses - the Ebola virus genome is only ~19000 base pairs (compared to ~7500 for poliovirus; smallpox is ~185,000 bp, which would be MUCH more difficult, I think...). I seriously doubt that al-Qaeda will accomplish this anytime soon, but who knows, a well-funded, well-educated bunch of kooks could have a go at it. Remember Aum Shinrikyo? They managed to put together a pretty sophisticated chem/bio lab without anyone realizing it until it was too late...

-SM

Or at least Vanessa Angel.

diptheria, pertussis, or tetanus - in that it has its own place out there in the environment independent of human disease. Smallpox isn't like that; if it's gone from people, it's gone. But if memory serves, polio vaccine prevents the paralytic variety, but you can still shed polio virus from time to time. I'm thinking it's actually a fairly common disease in the mild-to-undetected form. Therefore we'll need to keep vaccinating. But I could be remembering altogether wrong here...I'll go look and get back on this.

for example, to rebut this silliness you postulate about there being a natural reservoir of polio virus lurking out there. after all, everyone knows that the polio vaccine itself causes polio, and that's the only reason people are still afflicted with this disease. and if you don't believe me, i suggest you go to google where you can find a whole lot of non-peer-reviewed scientific studies to back me up.
:freak:

Oh, that's good. hehehe

Just thought you should know. :D