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Comment by ddebernardy | Hacker News Reader

It's still the only one we've eradicated insofar as I can recollect... (Polio will, hopefully, follow in the coming decades.)

Aside - Good video series by Yale for anyone interested in the history of diseases in western society:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoWxdlGBVTI&list=PL7C32775F0...

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Rinderpest was an infectious disease of cattle, which was eradicated slightly more recently. A cattle disease might seem like a weird priority, but for marginal cattle farmers in poor nations your cows dying basically means very likely you'll starve. So in effect we wiped out one cause of poor people starving to death.

We're getting damned close with guinea worms -- down from 3.5 million cases in 1986 to 22 in 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis

May the day when it drops to zero come soon.

I do hope we get a full genomic sequence of it before it's gone, though. Anything that has co-evolved dealing with the human immune system for so long likely has useful tricks up its sleeve if they were applied for medical use.

And considering how much suffering this parasite has caused, it is a nice thought to think that humanity might get some benefit out of it beyond simply stopping the cycle of pain.

They're currently sequencing the hell out of it to figure out why it's attacking dogs and what they can do about that.

Glad to hear it, and I hope they come up with a canine solution with speed.

The parasite evolved to attack dogs, unfortunately, so there 500 cases of dracunculiasis in dogs were reported in Chad in 2015. So there's a new reservoir. Still, there is hope.

From what I can tell, wild Polio cases have been in the low double digits the past couple years. Hopefully it will be gone by the end of next decade.

It's a bit more complex than that. The Smallpox vaccine was based on the virus of another species. The Polio virus is based on a weakened human virus - which, unfortunately, sometimes becomes infectious again and that is a problem in its own right. Also, the last pockets of infection are basically in war zones where it's difficult to get the vaccines to. But hopefully you're right - maybe we'll eradicate it in the next few decades.

OPV is a weakened virus, that's why you took it orally, but the modern vaccine isn't, it's a conventional killed virus vaccine and, since it's dead, can't cause polio.

Unfortunately the modern vaccine is also much more expensive (which is a problem in poor countries) and much less effective (which is a problem in countries with endemic polio).

I thought viruses weren't alive as such?

Sure, and neither is a car. But we understand if someone says "My car is dead" they don't mean merely that they switched off the ignition.

If you prefer another word is "inactivated".

Anyhow, I'd like a more precise description of the difference between "weakened" and "dead/inactive" (which is what the parent of my comment was about).

"bricked"

Viruses being alive is a debated topic and doesn’t have an objective distinction from what I understand.

There are two polio vaccines - the conventional live-attenuated polio vaccine works really well in developing settings, because it's cheap, multi-dose, and vaccinated individuals shed virus, which give people who were previously or un-vaccinated some protection via exposure.

But if we ever get down to actually thinking "These are the last 5 cases..." it's entirely possible to use the killed virus formulation used in the U.S. and Europe.

Where those cases are is a bigger pain.

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