Polio teams workers still get killed regularly, and in fact, in searching for news on polio workers, discovered tragically that one worker was killed just today:
https://twitter.com/TNNEnglish/status/1727695070906957889
and polio vaccination drives have been delayed in other areas too (separate from the unfortunate incident above)
https://twitter.com/MajidBuhair/status/1727755867666452722
I mean what can I say of others, back in my own extended family, I have cousins who refused to vaccinate their kids at all, like no vaccine of any kind, and nothing I or anyone can say will change their mind. Thing is that they are not illiterate, they have been to schools, they are just.. stubborn.
That means attack vectors exist in all directions.
I personally discovered this the hard way when I randomly caught a case of mumps despite having been vaccinated as a child with the MMR vaccine (my dumbass doctor thought I had "mild-tonsillitis" and sent me home with antibiotics) Not sure where I caught it from but thankfully it was mild and I recovered after 10 days of absolute misery.
But the moral of the story is, not only is polio unlikely to be eradicated, but even people like me who thought they were covered by vaccination from dutiful parents, are still vulnerable to all these diseases, either as patients or carriers.
Our vaccination drives are not forming effective vaccine shields, and that means we have to think of treatment and not prevention as the "first" step of our fights against diseases.
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> The result came back a month later: it was wild polio type 1, not seen in the continent since 2016.
> Sequencing traced its origin to Pakistan, but also revealed that the virus had been circulating for two years undetected — possibly in Malawi, and possibly elsewhere. Because Malawi had no wastewater surveillance at the time, it was impossible to know.