Polio is a terrifying disease in every sense of the word. There is no effective treatment for it, and the only way is prevention through vaccination against the virus that causes it.
Since the world reached the polio vaccine, about 70 years ago, the horrific disease has already disappeared, or almost, so what has brought it back to life now?
But before answering this question and the relationship of the story to the Corona epidemic, let us turn a little bit into the pages of the past, when polio terrified parents around the world, and that was in the first half of the last century.
Polio mainly affects young children under the age of five, and is often asymptomatic, but it can also cause symptoms including fever and vomiting.
One infection in every 200 leads to irreversible paralysis, and of these patients, up to 10% die.
For the first time in decades, it appears that polio is on its way to spreading in the British capital, London, New York City, and Jerusalem as well. This led to calls for more focus on vaccination campaigns to prevent the deadly disease that paralyzed tens of thousands of children every year.
There is no cure for polio, but since a vaccine was found in the 1950s, polio has been completely preventable. Globally, the original virus has almost disappeared.
Currently, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries where the highly contagious disease, which is transmitted mainly through contact with “baby faeces”, is common.
But this year, imported cases were also detected in Malawi and Mozambique, the first in those countries since the 1990s, according to a Archyde.com report.
There are two main types of polio virus. Besides the original type, there are also rare cases of what is known as vaccine-induced polio.
This is the second form that was detected in sewage in the British capital, London, and in New York, in the United States, with one case of paralysis reported in New York State.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative said a virus with similar genetic traits was also found in Jerusalem, and scientists are working to understand the link 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 of the disease each year, including 415 cases in Nigeria in 2021.
This second type stems from the use of the oral polio vaccine, which contains a live attenuated virus. After children are vaccinated, the virus remains in their stool for a few weeks.
In societies where vaccination rates are low, this type of virus can spread and mutate again into a harmful version of it.
Experts said that while countries, including Britain and the United States, no longer use this vaccine that contains a live virus, others are using it, especially to stop the outbreak of the disease, allowing global spread, especially when people began to travel again after Corona.