With nearly a million children being vaccinated in London, how worried should we be?
Without them, 20 million people who can walk todayThe disease has been beaten back from a global problem in the 1980s to enclaves in just a couple of countries now.But although Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only countries where polio continues to circulate, this endemic disease remains a threat to the rest of the world.The first case of wild polio in Africa for more than five years was reported in a three-year-old girl in Malawi.
However, it works by causing a stomach infection - so it is in people's faeces, from where it can spread to others.But at it passes from one person to the next, it can mutate until it can cause paralysis again.The oral vaccine has been hugely successful - but this ability to revert to its more dangerous form is why countries aim to switch to an injection of dead virus once they are polio-free.
Some of the samples show signs of regaining the ability to cause paralysis - and genetic analysis suggests the virus has been spreading.For the fully vaccinated, the risks are negligible. But the risk of paralysis for the unvaccinated is between one in 100 and one in 1,000, depending on their age. Overall, the UK has high rates of vaccination - but there are pockets where far too few have had the vaccine.In some boroughs, that rises to nearly 40%.Polio feels like a disease of the past - but the virus being found in London and the case of paralysis in the US are a particularly loud wake-up call to each of us and to our governments that we cannot be complacent about polio.
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