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

Excellent!

[jones_supa]

These are fantastic news!

Re:Excellent!

[Bite The Pillow]

All it took was a single country to do the needful.

But vaccinations give you autism

[Swampash]

Jenny McCarthy wouldn't lie to me!

it'll be back

[bloodhawk]

Given the epidemic of stupid parents that refuse to immunise children nowadays it should not be long till many of the old virus's and diseases rear their ugly heads again.

Re:it'll be back

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given the epidemic of stupid parents that refuse to immunise children nowadays it should not be long till many of the old virus's and diseases rear their ugly heads again.

I wouldn't call this 'good' news; but polio is sufficiently unpleasant to send your basic chickenshit first world antivaxxer running screaming to the nearest vaccination location (for most childhood diseases for which vaccines are available, you aren't helping your odds by playing at anti-vax; the serious disease effects are still somewhat more common than the vaccine side effects; but polio is a genuinely nasty customer).

Thankfully it has no animal vectors (of any note in the wild, I'm sure you can buy a mouse model or something that is susceptible in the lab) so it mostly hangs out in areas so remote or underdeveloped that sheer logistical difficulty keeps vaccination efforts sporadic.

The one nasty anti-vax angle with polio is, I'm ashamed to say, pretty much our fault: The CIA came up with a clever ruse to do some DNA gathering under the guise of a vaccination program (one for hepatitis B), and the subsequent revelation of this fact has not done much to quell the 'zOMG vaccines are a western and/or zionist conspiracy against muslims!!!' rumor mongering present in certain areas.

Re:it'll be back

[SuricouRaven]

The old terrors of disease have been eradicated in developed countries for so long that even the cultural memory is fading. People do not fear a disease they know absolutely nothing of.

Just ask people what the symptoms of cholora are. Most of them probably don't know, and that's still endemic in parts of the world.

Re:it'll be back

[bill_mcgonigle]

The CIA came up with a clever ruse

The CIA endangers everybody on the planet with their little game(s) - 'clever' could only be applied superficially.

Re:it'll be back

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I hoped that the context of my being ashamed to mention it made it clear how much I didn't approve of putting infectious disease control in the line of fire.

I'd say, though, that you might be more accurate to say that it's a myopically clever plan, rather than a superficially clever one. Within the narrow, barely relevant, context of 'so, we need a DNA sample from a well guarded private compound in a country where most of the locals hate our guts and going through the official channels would mean somebody tipping off our suspect within hours, any ideas?' A fake vaccination program is among the better available answers.

In the broader context of the fact that there's never been a man alive nearly as dangerous as some second rate infectious diseases, it's about the dumbest answer imaginable. (Extra demerits awarded for hampering control of polio, which is right on the edge of being finally eradicated, and for doing so in a region where any remaining infections are atypically likely to spread via the more downmarket Hajj trips to assorted other areas where vaccination programs are nontrivial).

Somehow, none of this is terribly out of character for the CIA, unfortunately.

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.

It is still a tough fight ahead

[crabel]

Current information on the fight against polio can be found here: http://www.polioeradication.org/Dataandmonitoring/Poliothisweek.aspx While India is polio-free, the worldwide cases actually increased last year. Well, let's hope for the best, that the optimistic assessment of Dr. Jafari is true.

Fantastic

[symbolset]

Great job on the part of India, the Gates foundation, and all involved. For polio to be eradicated forever would be a great thing.

Good on them!

[Okian Warrior]

From the Polio Eradication Website:

Polio remains endemic in three countries – Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. Until poliovirus transmission is interrupted in these countries, all countries remain at risk of importation of polio, especially in the ‘poliovirus importation belt’ of countries from west Africa to the Horn of Africa.

Only 372 cases worldwide last year! If we're careful, if we can convince certain political groups that polio is not an appropriate weapon of terrorism(*), we'll soon eliminate it completely.

Interestingly, polio is monitored from the sewage system in India. Since that appears to work for polio, people are thinking about using this method to monitor other things: other diseases, weapons manufacture, drug manufacture, and so on.

(*) Not making this up - some groups in Afghanistan think that spreading polio is a good way to get back at the Great Satan.

Re:Good on them!

[SuricouRaven]

There's a common rumor in Afganistan that the Polio vaccine is actually a potent lifetime contraceptive, distributed by western powers in order to keep Muslim women from breeding in readyness for a planned Christian invasion.

The most unbelieveable part of that is the idea of a government planning so far ahead.

Re:Good on them!

[Anonymous Coward]

The US and other western countries have done this for quite some time now (15-20 years in California that I know of), particularly for monitoring drug consumption of the population as a whole. I'm not sure if the resulting information is made readily available to the public, but there is a government agency out there somewhere collecting this information and using it for something important enough to substantiate the costs involved.

Source: One of my clients engineers the big compressors that are used to separate waste in sewage plants. Once separated, samples are taken and tested for various compounds.

They also engineer subsystems that are designed specifically to collect 'unintentional waste of reasonable value' - also known as jewelry. Your wedding ring that went down the shower drain? It didn't get dumped into the ocean. It's most likely that your local sewage plant found it and melted it down for the value of the metal and gems. I found out about this something like ten years ago, and that year my local plant had gained over $400k from reclaimed jewelry. So it seems that sewage treatment really is a dirty business.

Meanwhile, in Syria...

[Y-Crate]

The WSJ:

There also have been recent outbreaks in the Horn of Africa and Syria, although there are signs that those cases will soon be mopped up.

NPR:

The World Health Organization has declared a polio emergency in Syria.

After being free of the crippling disease for more than a decade, Syria recorded 10 confirmed cases of polio in October. Now the outbreak has grown to 17 confirmed cases, the WHO said last week. And the virus has spread to four cities, including a war-torn suburb near the capital of Damascus.

The Syrian government has pledged to immunize all Syrian children under age 5. But wartime politics is getting in the way. And the outbreak is expected to grow.

"Actually, it is spreading quickly," says Dr. Mohammed Al Saad in Gaziantep, Turkey, near the northern border of Syria. There are now more than 60 suspected cases, he says, with new ones reported each day.

Not so fast !

[Anonymous Coward]

Next door to India, Polio is making a come back.

Same thing also happening in Nigeria, as well as in Mali.

The common thread in the three locations that is helping Polio making a revival is Islam.

Yes, Islam is helping to make Polio a permanent fixture to the human race.

In Pakistan, they actually KILL health workers trying to eradicate Polio. Same thing happen in Nigeria, where Boko Haram has threaten (and sometimes kill) people trying to stop the spread of Polio.

Re:Not so fast !

[viperidaenz]

Nothing to do with Al Quaeda
http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/cleric-says-polio-vaccination-unislamic-warns-of-jihad-against-docs/961503/

Re:Not so fast !

[rvw]

Yes, Islam is helping to make Polio a permanent fixture to the human race.

The former two catholic popes did similar stuff with condoms and HIV in Africa and South America. I hope this one has more common sense.

Re:Not so fast !

[shutdown -p now]

From TFA:

"Religious leaders were persuaded to join the effort. "The calls that went out to the Muslim faithful every Friday contained reminders to take children to the immunization booths," said Mr. Kapur of Rotary International. "These were the people initially most skeptical of the vaccines but, once convinced, they became our biggest agents of change."

So it's not Islam in general that's anti-polio. Indeed, you don't get those craziness in any Muslim culture with well-educated populace.

The people who are killing health workers administering vaccines in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria are not just Muslims. They are Salafi, an extremely fundamentalist Muslim sect that espouses strict Koranic literalism and advocates for a return to the practices of the "original Islam" (which, basically, translates to society and culture frozen as it was in the times of Muhammad). Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, Caucasus Emirate etc - these are all Salafi.

Re:Not so fast !

[Chrisq]

Do you have a source or are you are retard?

My god how far has the propaganda that Islam is as harmless as the women's institute gone. Surely you must have read about all the polio workers killed?

Re:Not so fast !

[Chrisq]

Yes, Islam is helping to make Polio a permanent fixture to the human race.

The former two catholic popes did similar stuff with condoms and HIV in Africa and South America. I hope this one has more common sense.

Funny, I can't remember the last pope murdering health workers. Even if he did - does that make it right for Muslims to do it too?

Re:Not so fast !

[dbIII]

One of the reasons for that was some IDIOT in the CIA apparently using a polio vaccination program as a cover for a covert operation in Pakistan. There's some lines that should not be crossed. Otherwise it makes us little better than the people that turn kids into walking bombs.

Re:Not so fast !

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

One of the reasons for that was some IDIOT in the CIA apparently using a polio vaccination program as a cover for a covert operation in Pakistan.

It was actually hep-b vax and it was specifically intended to get info on bin laden in abbotobad. Not clear if it was helpful or not.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/the_fake_vaccination_scheme_absent_from_the_bin_laden_hunt_debates/

Re:Not so fast !

[Jason Levine]

Don't think that this only takes place in Africa and South America. My wife used to work for a private all-girls Catholic junior high school in New York. One year, she was teaching health and needed to cover sex education. They brought in someone else to teach it (which, honestly, my wife welcomed since teaching sex ed in a private Catholic school is kind of like grabbing a dangling power line and hoping it isn't live). This person proceeded to tell the girls a bunch of lies like all condoms have tiny holes in them that let sperm and viruses through.

My wife complained to the principal. Telling the girls not to have sex before marriage because God says so would be one thing. It is a religious school, after all. But spreading blatant lies like this is just wrong. The principal was shocked (or acted so) and promised to look into it. We don't know if this speaker was ever brought back because soon after this we had our second child and my wife quit her job to stay at home with him.

Still, the fact that there's someone who sells their services going from school to school spreading lies to scare kids into not having sex is frustrating. All this will do is cause kids to have unprotected sex which will lead to teen pregnancy and STDs. Even if they find out the truth, it means they'll be less likely to trust what an adult tells them and might not listen to another piece of advice that could have been life-saving.

Re:Not so fast !

[ShanghaiBill]

Nothing to do with Al Quaeda

AQ is a big part of it, and for GOOD REASON. The United States used health workers, including people administering polio vaccine, to collect intelligence against AQ and the Taliban. Some AQ people were killed as a result. The US has openly admitted doing this. They did it in Abbottadad, to try to local Osama bin Laden (the film "Zero Dark Thirty" showed health workers collecting intelligence). If you don't want health workers targeted in a war, then don't use them to target others.

Re:Not so fast !

[Artifakt]

The Roman Catholic church has these fellows called "Priests", who actually expect all good Catholics to confess their specific sins, and recieve counseling and do penance for each one as set by the priest. It often defaults to a scoring system, where sex gets you points, then planning for the sex in advance by buying condoms gets you more. Some people therefore feel less guilty, and are treated as officially less guilty, if they can say they didn't plan the sex in advance, it just happened. Since the sex itself can be a powerful motivator, doing the least 'sins' that still result in the reward is often the choice, instead of 'not sinning' at all.
            The question is, even under RC doctrine, why is sex a sin and doing something that indicates you planned it in advance a greater sin, instead of sex itself being a sin, but trying to reduce bad consequences such as disease spread to yourself OR YOUR PARTNER not a sin? Why is it assumed that using a condom is either to avoid preganacy (again, itself a sin), or to protect only yourself from the "God given consequences" of sin, but never out of genuine feeling for your partner? Why are priests specifically trained to discount that possibility?

Re:At constant risk

[Sockatume]

Criticises religion, "literally" places blame on satan. :)

Re:The 9/11 attackers were college educated !

[Chrisq]

"Well-educated" implies, among other things, the ability to rationally think about one's own religion.

Fact: Many Islamic Terrorists were college educated !

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/opinion/14bergen.html?_r=0

"We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering. In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available - the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree"

The 1993 attack on World Trade Center

"The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men, all of whom had a college education"

Of the 9/11 attack

"The 9/11 pilots, as well as the secondary planners identified by the 9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the Middle East. Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all things, urban preservation, while the operational planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina . We also found that two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved in 9/11 had attended college"

They were educated in colleges in America as well as in Europe. If they still can't THINK RATIONALLY after getting their college education in WESTERN UNIVERSITIES, who is to blame ?

The Western Universities or that bloody religion of Islam ?

Some people's thinking is so strange. Muslims with a University education commit acts of terrorism. Muslims without a University education commit acts of terrorism. So ... lets redefine "well educated" to mean thinking critically about religion and claim that the common factor is that "uneducated" commit acts of terrorism

Re:Hubris

[EmagGeek]

"Mosquitoes are entirely dispensable."

Tell that to the spiders, frogs, lizards, birds, fish, and the thousands of other species that evolved to subsist primarily on mosquitoes.

Also tell it to the aquatic plants that would suffocate and die if not for the mosquito larvae eating the detritus and other waste that would otherwise film the surface of stagnant lakes and create a gas-exchange barrier preventing the passage of nitrogen and oxygen.

The list goes on, but extincting the mosquito would have devastating environmental consequences.

I survived polio!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I mean I am still alive and polio is (almost) dead!

I contracted polio in rural India when I was about 5, 10 years after Salk's vaccine was deployed all over the USA. I had switched schools about six times in k-12, (civil servant dad posted to all the distant corners of the realm). In almost every class, in every school I had another victim as classmate. That is anecdotal evidence with the survivor bias too. How many had died? How many did not even attend school?

Well, I am glad the scourge has been eliminated in India. Hope the fundie clerics do not stand in the way of complete eradication. It is very disheartening the fundie clerics and the Haj pilgrimage is re-introducing it again in far flung regions of the world. If polio found an able adversary in science, it has found a reliable ally in the form of Muslim fundamentalists.

Don't worry...

[Charliemopps]

Don't worry, Jenny McCarthy will be over with a horde of uneducated soccer moms to fuck it all up for you soon enough.

Re:NPAFP: It was name "polio" that was eradicated

[gnoshi]

Totally.
Citation 1: a lot of people have been vaccinated
Citation 2: it has cost lost of monies
Citation 3: it cost the US some monies too
Citation 4: oh, and some of Bill's monies also
Citation 5: Rotary too
Citation 6: new WHO name-and-shame policy
Citation 7, 8: an acronym exists which no-one knows the origin of ...
Citation 22: Bill really, really wants polio gone. Seriously, he's been campaigning. ...
Citation 25: the first kind of relevant one to their claims, but doesn't actually seem to say what they say it does
Citation 26: Provides alternative explanation for their interpretation of Citation 25
Citation 27-28: Don't actually speak to the possible relationship and vaccine at all, but rather say that NPAFP is more dangerous than polio (loosely)
Citation 29: my personal favorite. Data which shows that in regions with number of doses, and cases of NPAFP. The winning characteristic is certainly that the claimed result is true, if you cherry-pick the regions for which it is true. i.e. if you look over all the regions and across times then you do find what they claim in two regions: the ones they present.

I'm winding it up there. The first of the 40 citations which is really relevant to the claimed connection between the vaccine and NPAFP is citation 29.
Citations 31+ likewise appear to not actually lend any support to the claim of an association between the vaccine and NPAFP, but rather point out that India has high rates of NPAFP (which is consistent with some of these being caused by enteroviruses spread via the fecal-oral route).

In summary: the paper remains bollocks, and virtually all of the 40 citations actually have 3/8 of FA to do with supporting their claim.

Quick

[CohibaVancouver]

Oprah! Call Jenny McCarthy, quick! We've got a situation in India that requires ignorance, stat!

Re:Unfair accusations

[cusco]

In many dioceses the Church also makes selling or giving away condoms a sin. Healthcare workers are also forbidden from recommending condoms for birth control. Marriages that cannot be "correctly" consummated, e.g. one partner has HIV so barriers must be used, are not considered valid.

It's not money and comfort, it's power that attracts many people to the priesthood. Power over parishioners in the case of the parish priest, or really enormous power over the political process affecting the lives of millions when they reach the position of archbishop or cardinal.