Four unvaccinated children contract polio

TriangleMan

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TriangleMan
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Here is a news report that four children in Minnesota have come down with polio. The children are from Amish families so were not vaccinated for religious reasons.

Attention anti-vaxers: Polio vaccines work! Stop tormenting children by exposing them to a potentially crippling illness!
 
This is ridiculous. Don't we have enough reasons to make vaccination mandatory? If this starts to spread, don't we risk it mutating and infecting vaccinated people?
 
eri said:
This is ridiculous. Don't we have enough reasons to make vaccination mandatory? If this starts to spread, don't we risk it mutating and infecting vaccinated people?
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I agree that the health concerns are the most important thing. Playing a bit of "devils advocate", when you start using terms like "mandatory", you raise questions about both health, and law. Advocates of one will site the concerns of the "public", while others will site the concerns of the "individual".

I could argue both sides (actually it would take me days to get the words right for both), but instead ask that both sides be listened to.

While you may want to tell someone that he "has" to give his child a shot that is "good for society", do not be surprised if a man says "I will be the judge of what is right or wrong for my family".

Again, working slightly in the field of health, I DO advocate for measures that help to ensure the general welfare of the populous, but can't help but also try to make sure that an individual is not forced to do something by the "state" that is contrary to thier religious beliefs.

It's a thin line, I know. Others have fought this battle before I, and other will after me.

Given a bit of perspective, it's a battle well worth fighting, by both sides. There are no winners or losers, because "individual freedom" and "the health of my child" are both things that are worth fighting for.

Ketyk
 
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I could be nasty, and just chalk it up to natural selection.

But how can people be so willfully ignorant? I suppose if you're female, and are born into a colony, you don't have much choice. But I don't think these cases are going to stay restricted to those sorts of communities.
 
Oh, I definitly understand where you're coming from, Ketyk. I wish I could think of a better way to handle this issue. It's just so frustrating to know that diseases that we have the capability to wipe out may keep reoccuring thanks to the anti-vaxers and others. And it's not only their own children they put at risk - if enough people follow suit, we lose herd immunity and we're right back to where we started.
 
The type of polio the Amish children got was from a vaccinated child. If the form they got didn't mutate back to the harmful form, then they have technically been vaccinated by association by the live vaccine virus (the virus was picked up in Europe).

This is actually a good thing if the more harmful wild virus were to rear its ugly head. These are now the only children protected in that population.

The reason the children were looked at was because a child sick for other reasons ended up in a hospital. The child was tested for illnesss, and this is one of the diseases that came up positive as the vaccine form.

There have been no ill effects by this type of polio on these children. Their bodies are now ready for the wild form should it ever be encountered. Thanks to vaccination, they may never see the wild form unless one of their own travels to where there are outbreaks of wild polio in the world. This is may never happen.

Should it ever happen though, then these folks are wide open to the harmful form of the disease. I can then only hope these children do spread their vaccine virus around a little more and vaccinate more of their population. Being a weak form though, this is unlikely.

If the form of disease they got is mutating back to the harmful form, then it would be better to get a direct vaccination of the harmless form. These people are playing with fire. We now use the "less effective" non-live vaccine in America now since the disease is no longer a perceived threat. These children could have gotten the dead version before being exposed to the attenuated version. They then would not have carried the attenuated version back to their homeland.
 
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I've run through some antivaccination sites. They are hailing the virus as not-harmless as usual, but they have completely missed that the virus is an attenuated vaccine virus for some reason.

These folks feel the polio is "natural to gut flora" afterall, so I'm not in the least bit surprised by the discussion:
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=356002

However, they fail to realize they have vaccination to thank for the fact that the Amish children are fine. It's hugely ironic. They still feel their unvaccinated kids will be fine if they were to ever come across the harmful, paralysing wild form of the virus.
 
Which countries use the Sabin vaccine (live attenuated)?

I thought everybody had already switched over to the Salk vax (inactivated virus)

I know the Sabin is supposedly better because it provides mucosal immunity (i.e. blocks the virus from invading the cells in the GI tract) but the reversion to wild type problem was big enough that the medical community had decided to recommend the Salk vaccine instead
 
Any countries that use the Sabin vaccine are doing so because the threat of a wild polio outbreak is still a real threat. You stated quite eloquently why.

http://www.who.int/features/2004/polio/en/

Some countries in Europe still use it. I'm trying find a source that will tell us which ones.

Between January and December 2004, wild polioviruses were isolated from AFP cases in 12 countries: Benin (6), Botswana (1), Burkina Faso (9),
Cameroun (13), Central African Republic (30), Chad (24), Côte d'Ivoire (17), Ethiopia (1), Guinea (7), Mali (19), Niger (25), Nigeria (789). With the exception of Botswana, Ethiopia, Guinea and Mali, all other countries also had wild virus cases in 2003. Additionally, Ghana and Togo had wild viruses in 2003 but not in 2004. In 2004 poliovirus serotypes 1 and 3 were both detected in Cameroun, Niger and Nigeria, and, all other countries had only type 1 cases. Based on VP1 sequences of viral isolates there was circulation of endemic viruses in Nigeria and Niger in 2004 and introduction of imported viruses into other countries. No vaccine derived polioviruses (VDPV) were detected in the region since 2002 when type 2 VDPVS were detected in Madagascar (4 cases) and Nigeria (1 case).

Wild polioviruses were isolated from AFP cases from 5 countries in 2004: Afghanistan (2), Egypt (1), Saudi Arabia (2), Sudan (125) and Pakistan (53). Only type 1 cases were found in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in 2004, whereas other countries also had serotype 3 viruses detected. In 2003 wild polioviruses had also been isolated from AFP cases in Afghanistan (8), Egypt (2), Pakistan (103) and Lebanon (1). Lebanon and Saudi Arabia had imported viruses, whereas all other countries had endemic viruses transmitted in 2003 and 2004. A supplementary surveillance activity in Egypt revealed endemic type 1 poliovirus in a sewage samples collected in 6 provinces in 2004 and 5 provinces in 2003.

SEAR: Wild polioviruses were detected in only 1 country in the region. India had 136 cases in 2004 of which 129 had type 1 and 7 had type 3 viruses. A type 2 VDPV was isolated from an immunodeficient patient in Thailand in 2003.
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http://www.who.int/immunization_monitoring/VolXIIssue1April05.pdf

I guess we can try extrapolate from this information and see which European nations are close to the areas?
 
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Didn't India just recently immunise millions of kids on one day with the oral vaccine?
 
Yes.

http://www.polioeradication.org/content/videoaudio/diary/index.asp

And more on Sabin vaccine:

But in developing countries, the Sabin vaccine is still used because it is easier to administer, especially where unsanitary conditions make it difficult to sterilize equipment for the injected vaccine. It is also easier to transport and is less expensive, Oshinsky explained. Once the number of polio cases drops to low enough levels-about a dozen or fewer cases per year-with the only cases occurring as a result of the live-virus vaccine, then the Salk vaccine will be used in these countries, as well, until eradication of the disease is achieved.
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http://www.aamc.org/newsroom/reporter/aug05/polio.htm
 
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