Vaccines are generated to help protect individuals and the population as a whole from spreading diseases. In order to get the just on different vaccination strategies, I will be discussing the disease polio in today’s blog. Polio is a very scary disease which happens to destroy a person’s motor neurons ultimately resulting in paralysis. In order to cause disease, it has to enter the body orally because it replicates in the cells that line the throat and the intestines. It is transmitted fecal-orally and therefore only infects people. There are two types of vaccines to prevent this disease, oral polio vaccine (OPV) and inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). Luckily in our society, we have not had to worry about polio for a number of years.
The OPV is considered an attenuated vaccine and the IPV is an inactivated vaccine. Before diving into the two vaccines, I wanted to briefly discuss the difference between an attenuated vaccine and an inactivated one. An attenuated vaccine contains a weakened form of the bacterium or virus and an inactivated vaccine consists of the bacterium or virus, but it is no longer active. These vaccines both have their respective pros and cons. The OPV specifically provides for better mucosal immunity because once it is in your system, the virus can kill off the polio disease before it infects the cells in your throat and intestines. Another plus is that you don’t have to get a series of vaccinations since it replicates which I would prefer because I do not like shots! Probably a major con is that this attenuated vaccine can potentially cause disease, a vaccine-derived poliovirus. While this is rare, it is common enough for the United States to not provide the OPV anymore. IPV requires a number of doses, ouch! The IPV was created first and did help lower the number of people infected with polio. This is the vaccine used through the United States today, and it has luckily served the United States well.
The World Health Organization recently announced that two of the three stains of polio have been eradicated. Even though we don’t have it in our country, one strain of polio still does remain in two other countries today, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is not a cure for polio, therefore we have to do our best to keep the disease out! Since children are most at risk, we need to continue to get vaccinated in the United States to keep the virus from emerging and killing millions of people. We have effectively gotten rid of two of the three strains already. If we can work together, we can become a polio-free world!
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