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For only the second time in its history, the World Health Organization has declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The threat is an upsurge of polio, even as the world comes close to eradicating the virus. In response, vaccination drives will be stepped up, while authorities try to ensure that people in 10 countries who want to travel internationally have been vaccinated in the previous 12 months.
The declaration follows a week-long consultation among global polio experts triggered by a worrying surge in cases during 2014, even though it has so far been the low season for the disease, which attacks the nervous system and can cause paralysis. Polio primarily spreads through contaminated water supplies, and with the warmth and rains of spring in the northern hemisphere, the high season starts in the next few weeks.
originally posted by: Tucket
originally posted by: Ghost147
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Ill take some heat for this..but I suggest its just more fear mongering..
I mean, they hooked you right? The first words you wrote were "...this is scary."
In our 2011 series, The Age of Polio – How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-made Epidemic, we proposed that beginning in the late 1800s, the poliovirus – for millennia a harmless enterovirus – was rendered dangerous by its interaction with the new agricultural pesticide lead arsenate. Our theory: the pesticide caused damage that allowed the virus to penetrate the nervous system and reach the spinal cord, where it caused the paralysis called poliomyelitis.
By last year at this time, there had been only 24 cases worldwide of disease caused by wild polio virus, representing only 6 per cent of the 417 cases eventually diagnosed last year. This year there have already been 68 cases, meaning numbers could now rise much higher. Nine of those were in five countries which had no known cases last year.
Polio currently circulates constantly in only three countries: Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan. The biggest problem is Pakistan, home of 59 of this year's 68 cases, where some polio vaccinators have been shot by political dissidents. Pakistan is now quelling the scourge, says Aylward, with massive security and bans on motorcycles during vaccination drives to reduce the threat of drive-by shootings.
More importantly, without eradication, a resurgence of polio could paralyze more than 200,000 children worldwide every year within a decade.” Now is the time, we must not fail.
CDC
originally posted by: Snarl
originally posted by: Tucket
originally posted by: Ghost147
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Ill take some heat for this..but I suggest its just more fear mongering..
I mean, they hooked you right? The first words you wrote were "...this is scary."
No heat from me. I grew up with kids crippled by polio. It's not scary ... It's terrifying. For perspective, go ask people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki if they're comfortable with the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction.
originally posted by: Tucket
originally posted by: Ghost147
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Ill take some heat for this..but I suggest its just more fear mongering..
I mean, they hooked you right? The first words you wrote were "...this is scary."
originally posted by: candlestick
a reply to: Ghost147
I don't really care ...I guess no one in here under 5 years old ,right ?
originally posted by: ZeussusZ
a reply to: intrptr
So 6% of polio cases where from the wild virus. The other 94% where from what ?
Poliovirus (genus Enterovirus) types 1, 2, and 3.
CDC