The title sums it up! I am very uneducated when it comes to the Polio Virus, and the vaccines IPV and OPV. With some digging I am now educated!
IPV and OPV are the two vaccines in place to prevent the Polio virus. Their names are the Inactivated Polio Virus, and the Oral Polio Vaccine. OPV is the vaccine that is administered orally while IPV is given through syringes as injections into the body. Given this, IPV is obviously the more complicated vaccine compared to OPV. Which makes perfect sense to me that OPV is the more known and accessible form of the vaccine, alongside the fact that it does not require a physician or trained individual to administer the vaccine. The inactivated vaccine should be given to children over four increments until the age of 6. This differs if the child is planning to leave the country due to an increased risk of developing polio in specific areas. Herd immunity is a huge asset of this disease because the higher portionality of those who get vaccinated as children will decrease the risk of spread because you do not have to continue to get vaccinated as long as you did when you were a child. There are also those who should not receive the polio vaccine due to increased allergies, illnesses, or if you are immunocompromised.
Recent studies into the OPV vaccine have led scientist to believe that there are many undercover benefits associated with live vaccines such as the polio vaccine. Non-specific benefits that can be described as effects of the safeguard from target infection that the vaccine is eliminating. A large reduction in mortality have accompanied this phenomenon. This has also been recognized alongside the Measles vaccine. These non-specific effects prove and support the fact that stopping live vaccines could have very traumatic results overall across populations.
There are constant changes and improvements occurring recently and to come in 2020 alongside the polio vaccine to make it more effective. For instance, it has been discovered that there are many flaws with the current inactivated vaccine in place. Financial and systematic problems include the fact that the vaccine has to be stored and transported at a very specific temperature that is not too cold where it will freeze and not too warm where it will melt. This temperature is between 2 degrees Celsius and 8. This sounds like a very impractical inconvenience to me. How does one keep this vaccine in this temperature frame at all times, is there not something we can do to modify the vaccine so that this isn’t the case? But what do I know??? When i continued reading the article I realized that yes they are working to change this! Those currently studying and proposing ideas for the development of new vaccines have raised the idea of an air drying technique that would use the material already inside the vaccine, its silk fibroin. They have been practicing with this technique and have came to the conclusions that the fibroin films on IPV maintained high potency D-antigen values recommending that their storage for long periods of time at room temperature proved their hypothesis correct. This would also eliminate financial barriers by allowing the vaccine to be administered via microneedles.
I can now say that I know more about the Polio vaccines. To my understanding, both are under great construction. This is important due to the increased instances of disease in the past 3 months where the number of cases have near tripled. Over a total of 15 countries, Polio has been receiving lots of attention especially with the Type 2 form where scientists are linking this to the type 2 OPV vaccine. This has been a problem in the past as well. In 2016, physicians and those studying the disease recognized trends of occurrences alongside the type 2 OPV vaccine which led to the switch from tOPV vaccines to the new and improved bOPV. Trivalent vaccine not being administered anymore seemed to be a fix to the problem….. obviously not. While most of the recent outbreaks are in places like Africa and China, it is still a major concern as it is mainly children being affected following the switch to bOPV. Type 1 has appeared in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. I view this as under administered, or lack of access to necessary vaccines in countries with less healthcare assistance. This needs to change!!!We should be able to eradicate this disease entirely!
MicroBio 