polio

Synthetic vaccine sought to finally eradicate polio

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Synthetic vaccine sought to finally eradicate polio

 

An international team of scientists is to try to develop a wholly artificial vaccine to combat polio.

The disease is very close to being eradicated, with only a few hundred cases now reported worldwide each year.

The hope is that the new approach can address some shortcomings in an existing vaccine, and so help eliminate polio altogether.

The World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are providing a $674,000 (£438,000) grant.

The project was announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California.

Researchers in the US and the UK will participate. In Britain, this will pull in workers from Leeds, Oxford, Reading, and the Diamond synchrotron.

 

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For Polio, Two Vaccines Work Better Than One

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A booster dose of inactivated polio vaccine bolsters the immune system and reduces viral shedding in children already treated with the oral polio vaccine, a study shows

 

Depending on when and where in the world you were born, you may have received a different kind of polio vaccine than someone else born into different circumstances. If you were born in the U.S. after 2000, for example, you likely received an injection of the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), but before that, you might have received the oral polio vaccine (OPV), a live attenuated virus, administered by mouth. Starting later this year, children born in polio-affected countries will receive both vaccine types, per World Health Organization (WHO) “endgame” plans to finish the job of eradicating polio.

The results of a study published today (August 21) inScience support this approach. In a group of Northern Indian children who had already received one or more doses of OPV, a supplementary dose of IPV bolstered their immune responses and reduced their shedding of viral particles in stool, a team led by researchers at the WHO reported.

 

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To Finish Off Polio

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To Finish Off Polio

Along with vaccination, antiviral drugs could play a key role in the eradication of poliovirus, but it’s unclear whether today’s candidate therapies will withstand the challenges of the clinic.

The international spread of polio from Pakistan, Syria, and Cameroon to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Equatorial Guinea, respectively, which last month caused World Health Organization (WHO) officials todeclare a public health emergency, serves as a devastating reminder that, although vaccination campaigns have squelched polio in most of the world, eradication is not complete. As of June 11, the virus has sickened 79 people in those three polio-exporting countries and 94 individuals worldwide this year alone. That’s up from 55 cases worldwide through June last year.

Vaccination campaigns and global public health initiatives have caused worldwide cases of polio infection to drop from more than 350,000 reported in 1988, giving researchers reason to hope the infectious disease was near defeat. But as the WHO points out on its website, “as long as a single child remains infected with poliovirus, children in all countries are at risk of contracting the disease.”

 

Read full story at TheScientist