Re: Polio Was Almost Eradicated. This Year It Staged a Comeback - THANKS JOE BIDEN & DEMOCRAT CHILD KILLERS!

[Biden Imports POLIO in 2022!]

In article <t1ve0m$39noe$2...@news.freedyn.de>
<governo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Obama brought EBOLA into the USA. Not to be outdone, Joe Biden allows
> millions of polio carrying illegal aliens into North America.
>

At the beginning of this year, there was a thrum of excitement
among global health experts: Eradication of polio, a centuries-
old foe that has paralyzed legions of children around the globe,
seemed tantalizingly close.

Pakistan, one of only two countries where wild poliovirus still
circulates, had not recorded cases in more than a year.
Afghanistan had reported only four.

But eradication is an uncompromising goal. The virus must
disappear from every part of the world and stay gone, regardless
of wars, political disinterest, funding gaps or conspiracy
theories. New signs of the virus in a single country can derail
the effort.

In polio’s case, there were several ominous setbacks.

Malawi in February announced its first case in 30 years, a 3-
year-old girl who became paralyzed following infection with a
virus that appeared to be from Pakistan. Pakistan itself went on
to report 14 cases, eight of them in a single month this spring.

In March, Israel reported its first case since 1988. Then, in
June, British authorities declared an “incident of national
concern” when they discovered the virus in sewage. By the time
New York City detected the virus in wastewater last week, polio
eradication seemed as elusive as ever.

“It’s a poignant and stark reminder that polio-free countries
are not really polio-risk free,” said Dr. Ananda Bandyopadhyay,
deputy director for polio at the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, the largest supporter of polio eradication efforts.

The virus is always “a plane ride away,” he added.

Polio is a highly contagious and sometimes deadly enemy, capable
of ravaging the nervous system and causing paralysis within
hours. Those who recover could relapse and become seriously ill
years later.

The virus multiplies in the intestine for weeks and could spread
through feces or contaminated food or water — for example, when
an infected child uses the toilet, neglects washing hands and
then touches food.

For decades the virus terrorized families, causing paralysis
among more than 15,000 American children each year and hundreds
of thousands more worldwide. Its retreat is a triumph of
vaccination. After the first vaccine arrived in 1955, the number
of cases dropped precipitously, and by 1979 the United States
was declared polio-free.

Although the United States and Britain have high immunization
rates, they also have pockets of low immunity that allow the
virus to flourish. In those communities, all unvaccinated people
— not just children — are at risk. If polio continues to spread
in the United States for a year, the country may lose its polio-
free status under W.H.O. guidelines.

The Covid-19 pandemic left many other countries vulnerable to a
resurgence of polio: It disrupted vaccination drives for months
and diverted staff and resources away from prevention programs,
resulting in the worst backslide in immunization rates in 30
years.

“The moment you take your eye off the ball, you know that the
virus will simply reappear,” said Aidan O’Leary, director for
polio eradication at the World Health Organization. “We have to
literally face down every single chain of transmission that we
can identify.”

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Aid organizations first aspired to eradicate polio in 1988 and
poured billions of dollars into the Global Polio Eradication
Initiative, a consortium of six partners, including the Gates
Foundation, the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.

Despite the recent cases, the progress is unmistakable: Global
cases of polio have fallen by 99 percent — from 350,000 cases of
paralysis in 1988 to about 240 so far this year.

That success “is both a miraculous thing and a thing that’s
taken way, way longer than people expected,” said Bill Gates,
who has taken a pointed interest in polio, in an interview in
February. “Eradications are super hard, and they rarely should
be undertaken.”

Ending polio has been particularly challenging.

There are three strains of the wild poliovirus. Type 2 was
declared eradicated in 2015, and Type 3 in 2019. Only Type 1
poliovirus remains at large, and only in Pakistan and
Afghanistan.

Until recently, there was good reason to be optimistic about
Type 1’s demise. India and Nigeria were both considered
impossible targets for polio elimination, but both achieved that
goal.

“There were so many people who kept telling us you will never
succeed in India,” said Dr. Hamid Jafari, W.H.O.’s director of
polio eradication for the eastern Mediterranean region.

Afghanistan and Pakistan have proven more difficult because of
their nomadic populations, rough terrain and the baseless notion
that the vaccine is a Western tool for sterilizing the
population, Dr. Jafari said.

In Afghanistan, polio thrived in areas where immunization bans
were imposed by the Taliban. In late March, the Taliban allowed
vaccinations to resume, but the doses are administered in door-
to-door campaigns, often by female health care workers. Some
have been assaulted and killed.

Only one human viral disease, smallpox, has ever been
eradicated. For all its deadliness, smallpox was relatively
simple to dispatch because every infection resulted in dramatic,
unmistakable symptoms.

Polio is much more sly: It can spread silently, causing mild
flulike symptoms or none at all, and yet the disease paralyzes
one of every 200 infected children. Even one case of paralysis
is a signal that there may be hundreds or even thousands of
undetected infections.

“Paralysis is the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Walter
Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a
former director of the United States’ Immunization Program.

But in some countries, polio has become such a dim and distant
threat that health officials have stopped looking for it. While
Britain and Israel monitor sewage for the virus — ideal because
polio spreads through fecal matter — many others, including
those in the United States, have ceased active surveillance.

“There’s no doubt that there are places where it needs to be
reinforced,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, W.H.O.’s regional
director for Africa.

The single case imported into Malawi from Pakistan resulted in
mass immunizations of nearly 28 million children in Malawi and
its neighbors. But health care workers had become unaccustomed
to door-to-door campaigns.

In the Chikwawa district in southern Malawi in March, Charles
Bizimaki woke at 5 a.m., took the lunch his wife had packed for
him and walked several kilometers to a nearby village. Mr.
Bizimaki has been the vaccine manager for six villages since
2007.

But he had not conducted a door-to-door vaccination campaign
since a tetanus outbreak in 2013 and had never led one for polio.

The campaign was physically exhausting and frustrating because
it sometimes took multiple visits before he could find a child
at home. “It was not an easy job,” Mr. Bizimaki said. It took
him six days to vaccinate every child under 5 in the nearby
villages.

Immunization for polio can be done in one of two ways. The
injected vaccine used in the United States and most rich
countries contains killed virus, is powerfully protective
against illness but doesn’t prevent the vaccinated from
spreading the virus to others.

Mass vaccination campaigns rely on the oral polio vaccine, which
delivers weakened virus in just a few drops on the tongue. The
oral vaccine is inexpensive, easy to administer and can prevent
infected people from spreading the virus to others, a method
better suited to extinguishing outbreaks.

But it has one paradoxical flaw: Vaccinated children can shed
the weakened virus in feces, and from there it can sometimes
find its way back into people, occasionally setting off a chain
of infections in communities with low immunization rates.

If the weakened virus circulates for long enough, it can slowly
mutate back into a more virulent form that can cause paralysis.

Even as wild poliovirus has been on the decline, so-called
vaccine-derived polio has been on the upswing. Cases tripled
between 2018 and 2019, and again between 2019 and 2020. Between
January 2020 and April 2022, 33 countries reported a total of
nearly 1,900 cases of paralysis from vaccine-derived polio.

The samples found in London sewage, in Israel and in New York
are all vaccine-derived virus. They carry the same genetic
fingerprint, suggesting that the virus may have been circulating
undetected for about a year somewhere in the world.

Eradicating polio would require wiping out the vaccine-derived
type, not just the few remaining hot spots of wild virus. “We
definitely need to stop all polio transmission, whether wild
poliovirus or whether circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus,”
said John Vertefeuille, who heads polio eradication at the C.D.C.

Vaccine-derived polio has become more prevalent because the oral
vaccine in use now protects against only Types 1 and 3 of the
virus. In 2016, buoyed by the seeming eradication of Type 2
virus, the W.H.O. withdrew it from the oral vaccine. That move
left the world increasingly vulnerable to outbreaks of residual
Type 2 virus.

At the same time, global health organizations shifted away from
maintaining nimble teams that can swiftly stamp out outbreaks to
strengthening health care systems overall. Regions that struggle
to contain polio tend to have other public health problems, such
as poor nutrition, access to safe drinking water and other
infectious disease outbreaks.

But the response to an outbreak of polio — or to other
infectious diseases like Covid-19 or monkeypox — requires
dedicated teams and programs, said Kimberly M. Thompson, a
health care economist whose work focuses on polio eradication.

The W.H.O. has not delivered on that goal for decades, “but
there is no accountability for performance,” Dr. Thompson said.
Likewise, countries that receive funding for polio are rarely
held responsible for diverting the money to other programs, she
added.

As a result of the dismantling of outbreak teams, the response
to vaccine-derived polio has often been sluggish and inefficient.

“The speed and the quality of the responses will have to go up
in order for us to stop these outbreaks,” Dr. Vertefeuille said.

In November 2019, the W.H.O. granted an emergency use
authorization for a novel oral vaccine that is specific to the
Type 2 virus. The vaccine, which took a decade to develop, is
more genetically stable than the widely used oral vaccine and
less likely to revert to a form that can cause paralysis.

The eventual goal for polio eradication is to immunize children
in every country with the injected vaccine used in the United
States, said Jalaa’ Abdelwahab, director of vaccine programs at
Gavi, which helps increase immunizations in poor countries.
Supplies of oral vaccine would be stockpiled only to respond to
unexpected outbreaks, Mr. Abdelwahab said.

The recent cases have forced a reassessment of the strategies
being used to detect and contain polio. The C.D.C. is planning
to introduce wastewater surveillance at strategic sites in the
country, according to a statement from the agency.

Pakistan has among the largest wastewater surveillance systems
for polio, but vaccine hesitancy is rampant. One team of
scientists, led by Dr. Jai Das at Aga Khan University in
Karachi, has found that offering communities an incentive —
installing water pumps, for example — if they raise vaccination
rates may be more effective than unconditional cash prizes for
individuals.

Eradicating polio by 2026, the current goal, will require
innovative strategies, patience and persistence — and an
estimated $4.8 billion.

“That last mile, those last cases, are always the hardest,” said
Simon Bland, chief executive officer of the Global Institute for
Disease Elimination.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/health/polio-new-york-
malawi.html