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The curse of the virus

No, I'm not talking about computer viruses, I'm talking about the good old biological ones that can be incredibly difficult to totally eradicate.

When I was a young lad I recall standing in a line at primary school and being given a small paper cup containing some tasteless liquid that appeared to be nothing more than water. Fortunately for me, and millions of others, it was more than water.

The fluid was a vaccination against polio, a disease that had ravaged previous generations throughout the world. As if to make the point, there was a boy in our class who was confined to a wheelchair, having already fallen victim to this evil virus.

Thanks to a very concerted effort by health authorities throughout the Western world, polio is now little more than a scary but distant memory for those who stood in those lines and took that vaccination.

Or is it?

Reports out of Syria indicate that due to the effect of the civil war being waged there, polio is again gaining a foothold within the population and threatens to become an epidemic amongst those who are not immunised against it.

Health authorities believed that polio had almost been totally eradicated (as was smallpox some years earlier) and because of this, vaccination hasn't been given a high priority. Why vaccinate against a disease that that is no longer on your radar?

Unfortunately, due to breakdowns in the effluent processing and other sanitation services in parts of Syria currently playing stage to the armed conflict going on there, the virus is now spreading and as many as 3 million Syrians may be unvaccinated and vulnerable to infection.

According to reports, Syria claimed to have eliminated polio back in the 1990s and so recently vaccination was no longer given the priority it had in the past - despite instances of the disease being reported elsewhere in the region.

Right now the WHO is trying to organise mass vaccination programmes to protect young Syrians but the scale and nature of the armed conflict may make this difficult.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here...

I don't know if NZ and Australian kids are still immunised against polio but maybe it would be a good idea to keep this disease on the list until such time that it is totally eradicated. If we allow "eradicated diseases" to fall off the immunisation list then we do run a massive risk of pandemic, should we be wrong and a few infected people interact with well-traveled others.

Viruses and bacteria may be small but, thanks to their highly adaptive and opportunistic nature, plus their sheer weight of numbers, they can be a formidable foe that ought never be underestimated.

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