Welcome Back!
This week, I wanted to gain a better understanding of the Polio or Poliomyelitis virus. I wanted to understand what Polio is and exciting recent news. Polio is a naked RNA virus. According to the CDC, it can cause paralysis. An interesting fact about it is that most people who have Polio don’t have visible symptoms. 1 in 4 people will have flu-like symptoms. A really small population will have serious symptoms like paralysis, meningitis, and paresthesia (feeling of pins in your legs). Post-polio syndrome can occur in children who seemed to have fully recovered; however, they will develop muscle pains, weakness, or paralysis up to 40 years later due to their childhood virus. This is very unfortunate. It would be awful to become paralyzed in your 40s due to a virus you can’t remember having. A big misconception that I had was the classification of who has Polio. Because it is named a paralytic disease, only people with a paralytic infection are considered to have it.
Polio is very contagious, spreading person to person affecting the spinal cord and brain. It infects only humans, infecting the throat and intestines first. It enters by the mouth and is transferred through contact with human feces or a sneeze/cough from infected people. You are most likely to get this virus if you are around feces and don’t wash your hands. It can live in feces for weeks and contaminate water systems. It is important to note that even if you don’t have the symptoms and have the virus, you can still transfer it and infect other people who may show symptoms. Basically, you need to make sure you wash your hands and drink filtered water. This is one major prevention option!
Luckily, there are also two vaccines that have been used: IPV (inactivated polio vaccine) and OPV (oral polio vaccine). Since 2000, the US has just administed IPV in children. This was established to eliminate the small risk of individuals developing Polio due to the active vaccine. There are 4 shots that are administered for the IPV in children. In exciting recent news, wild poliovirus 3 has been eradicated worldwide as of October of 2019! Two of the three wild Polio viruses have been eradicated. Type 2 was eradicated in 2015! These are major milestones and we can thank vaccines for them. Billions of lives are saved from these milestones. As of October of 2019, the only countries where WPV 1 is located are Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is what the power of consistent vaccination can do!
Microbiology with Alicia 