India Frees Itself of Polio

An anonymous reader writes "It's been three years since the last recorded polio case in India and health officials hope to officially certify India polio free in the next few weeks. 'Hamid Jafari, director of the WHO's polio-eradication campaign, says the agency's ambitious quest to stop all polio transmission by the end of 2014 is now within reach. If that is achieved, and no new cases crop up for three years, polio—like smallpox—will be officially banished from the planet. "India was one of the most important sources" from where the virus spread to other countries, said Dr. Jafari.'"

Comments

Re:it'll be back

[Jason Levine]

This is definitely the biggest problem with vaccines. Their very success is their biggest weakness. As people don't personally remember diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc, they mentally minimize the severity of it. Whooping cough? Sounds like you just have a bad cough for a week or two and then you're fine, right? Then they hear FUD about vaccines that leads to them mentally overestimating the risk of the vaccines. Before you know it you have a person who is thinking of injecting their child with this horrible mix of highly dangerous chemicals just to prevent their child from maybe coughing for a few days. They make the perfectly rational (in their mind, given their flawed assumptions) decision to forego vaccinations.

Sadly, the people who suffer are children like Dana Elizabeth McCaffery who die because they were too young to get the vaccine or people who have valid medical reasons for not getting the vaccine (immune system issues, allergies, etc). These people rely on the rest of us keeping herd immunity up. As the anti-vax movement grows, herd immunity breaks down and more people will die. The good news is that, as more people die, the anti-vax movement should be self-limiting. Who's going to seriously listen to Jenny McCarthy railing about vaccines if a hundred thousand people come down with measles? The bad news is that many, many people will get sick and either die or suffer permanent injury from vaccine-preventable diseases before this happens.