Global eradication of wild poliovirus type 2 declared
polioeradication.org
polioeradication.org
It's pretty amazing that for my parents who were born in the mid-20th century, polio was still a concern. When they were growing up, FDR had recently died of complications from the disease and they knew people who were debilitated by it. Within their lifetimes the vaccine literally changed the world, to the point where polio is not present in developed countries. Vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of human ingenuity.
>WPV3 has not been detected globally since November 2012 (in Nigeria); the only remaining endemic WPV1 strains are now restricted to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
So things are looking good.
Fake or not though, the US is definitely responsible for destroying decades of work to get local people to trust these vaccination programs. Pretty much for nothing but PR-points in the form of revenge.
Historically Hersh has been a successful investigate reporter but his LRB piece hasn't really been widely accepted: [2]
> Were it not for the byline of Mr. Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who first gained notice more than 45 years ago for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the story would likely have been readily dismissed and gained little attention.
1. http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin... 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/seymour-hersh-article-a...
You're right that the story comes off as incredibly one-sided, and some of the claims did indeed leave me with a feeling of "there's gotta be another side to this". On the other hand, many of the claims by themselves weren't that surprising either (of the type that makes people use the "I don't see why anyone is surprised"-non-dismissal).
But I'm always interested to try and balance that view somewhat.
That said, even without having read your links, I can't imagine any other interpretation of the events (as also corroborated by the US' PR themselves) that would not have caused the destruction of decades of building of trust in vaccination programs to the local populations. That part doesn't just come from Hersh, the US admitted as much themselves--well not the repercussions obviously, but that they did (ab)use the vaccination programs as cover for a conspiracy furthering US military interests.
As anyone remotely familiar with the difficulties for vaccination programs should know, that alone, well-substantiated rumours, are more than enough to ruin a local vaccination program entirely. I mean, obviously, the act of administering a vaccine to a person is not the hard part of these programs. It's the part to get them voluntarily choose to receive the vaccines.
Regardless of all the other bold claims and conspiracy surrounding the OBL operation, the US should have reconsidered thrice before involving the vaccination programs. The scales should have been abundantly clear:
One the one hand there's the possibility of a monumental achievement for the whole of mankind, the complete eradication of a terrible disease, saving who-knows how many lives, something that can without any reservations whatsoever be placed on the "good" side of just about anyone's moral compass. Those were the stakes, and they knew it.
And on the other hand, there's getting revenge on Osama Bin Laden, who didn't play a serious role any more in the wars the US is waging. Already when he was killed, the only reasonable reaction I could (sort of) understand was "yes of course it's just for PR and ego reasons alone. but eh, let them have it, maybe it'll provide some closure".
So yes, whoever made that call and went on with it, did it for extremely petty reasons. And yes it probably was not a single person that decided this, it was probably a rotten system stuck in a feedback loop of hate, like an ingrown toenail, that made it pretty hard for anyone involved not to go along with it. It's still petty, and they can still own it.
It will be many years before polio is gone from Pakistan and Afghanistan. If ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt%27s_para...
A question for those well-versed in the biomedical and ecological sciences: Could our attempts to eliminate viruses be a bad thing? I wonder about the ripple effects of ecosystems on each other. We do not brag about extinction of any other natural entity.
And, when eradication does not work, when we only hinder the growth of a virus, does the attempt to prevent infection (or any form of "mostly cleaned up" coverage) encourage the development of superviruses by selecting for the strongest in the set, in the same way bacteria do? If not, why?
> In the pre-epidemic era, enteric infections were so ubiquitous that most infants were infected within 6–12 months, at a time when they had circulating antibodies passively derived from their nursing mothers. Although serum antibodies did not prevent enteric infection, they were sufficient to preclude viremia, thereby avoiding invasion of the central nervous system and paralysis. The result was the acquisition of active immunity under the cover of passive protection.
So the hypothesis is that historically most people did have it and were immune, and only the improved hygiene past 1900 led to epidemics. We can indeed ask whether some individuals are worse off now because they didn't contract it in their infancy. But we're also doing pretty much the same thing with the vaccinations. Maybe we'll see a rise in allergic reactions when polio 2 vaccines are phased out. I don't think that anybody would advise infecting babies to get the benefits back though :-)
We are rapidly approaching an era of medical treatments where giving a treatment of "probiotics" to correct your newborn child's gut bacteria in order to prevent asthma much the way we give immunisations against diseases today. The hygiene hypothesis is getting some pretty compelling evidence and hopefully it will lead to us learning the "right" kind of things we should be exposing our children to in order to prevent these autoimmune conditions.
I would argue that viruses have an obvious impact into our human ecosystems. Losing a father, a mother, a sister, a teacher, a doctor hurts not only the person, but us all. So I would only argue for the preservation of viruses in the wild if they, somehow, had an even larger provable impact in the long run.
Also keep in mind that we don't need to eliminate viruses entirely, we can keep some samples in labs. So we aren't losing that much in term of potential scientific knowledge and we can always reintroduce them if we feel like. This is much harder to do with, say, polar bears. Once they are gone, they are gone for good. So it is in our best interest to preserve them in the wild. At least, until we figure out cloning or cryogenics.
To your second question, that can be a big problem. HIV is probably the best example. Patients receiving HAART can really hurt themselves if they skip a treatment; it gives the virus enough time to mutate and get ahead. Usually this works at the individual level because of the mutation rates in viruses - and their tendency to revert upon infection to a new host - but theoretically yes. Moral of the story? Always take all your drugs.
There's more to it than that (lookup "biological filter" for example), but the virus must mutate to avoid drugs, which usually means a fitness hit (lower replication, for example). Upon infection of a new host, the virus can quickly maximize fitness once again. Not a "base version" per se, but a more ideal, fit virus, without many/most of the escape mutations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance#Mecha...
The mechanism can be encoded on a plasmid, for example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC514751/
So in that case, a bacteria could import the mechanism wholesale from a resistant population.
(Plasmids are fragments of DNA that bacteria can swap back and forth, even across species)
Polio patients with breathing problems are where the "iron lung" was most widely used; it's basically a box or tube for the whole body except the head, with just enough seal and a timed low-level vacuum to allow the lungs to expand then contract when the low pressure is released.
In this same vein, go read the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on smallpox for a jolt of pride in human progress. "Smallpox WAS an infectious disease..."
Not mentioned is that this is likely due to the hunt for Osama bin Laden: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacci...
Why, yes, yes it is. Thank you for asking.
In fairness, they gave out actual vaccines not fake vaccines so it wasn't a "fake vaccination program." I was a real vaccination program that also did a bit of assassination of international terrorists on the side.
So, on balance it was a very positive program for the community.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-...
Bottom line is, mistakes were made, and getting your revenge on some old dude is not worth destroying decades of work trying to get a population to trust vaccination programs.
That article is questionable at best.
"Questionable at best" tries to imply something entirely different than what was being said, which is that Hersh's claims were bold, not entirely backed up and subject to criticism. "Questionable in part", al right, but extending that to "questionable at best" sounds like you're pushing your own agenda here.
Maybe you just worded yourself too strongly, but if you decide to stick with that, please explain to everyone how the claims about what the US did to the vaccination programs in order to get to Bin Laden, made in Hersh's article, are either "questionable" or "worse".
Because as far as I've been able to check, Hersh's claims about the actions regarding vaccination programs part of the story (which is just a small part--but the part we are discussing here) are not being criticized by anyone in particular, except by those painting with the very broad brush that the entire story is questionable. Like you are doing.
"WPV1 would be likely be eradicated right now if not for the hunt for Osama Bin Laden"
does not ring true.
War [ALMOST X]
Famine [X]
Pestilence [Almost X]
Death [TODO]
couldn't be farther from truth.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jul/21/...
http://ourworldindata.org/data/war-peace/war-and-peace-after...
Just how many superpowers are there?
Some say that the US is currently (and since the end of the cold war) the world's only superpower. Some would say that the term "superpower" is not applicable any more.
Wikipedia also gives a list of "potential superpowers", being "the countries (or political entities) most cited as having the potential of achieving superpower status in the 21st century" : " China India European Union Russia Brazil"
This might answer the question.
The whole nature of defining a superpower (and the taxonomy that follows) is a difficult one, a point lost on most people here.
Thanks again.
Sounds like it could be a slippery slope. I'm thinking there's a window of moral relativism to explore here.
Then we can begin to weigh it against the benefits of eradicating it, like the millions of lives saved and ripple effects from that.
I don't think this is a valid form of reasoning by itself. The onus is on you to show that the A > B > C > D causality chain is inevitable. Simply mentioning the phrase "slippery slope" doesn't constitute such an argument and can be dismissed without thought.