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Comment by ricree | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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".

"bricked"

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).

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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