USA detected in July the first case of Poliomyelitis (polio) and whose disease had not been identified in the country for more than a decade. In Spain It has been inactive for decades, but after the appearance of the variant of smallpox (monkeypox), society is increasingly alarmed by a situation toilet That makes us totally vulnerable.
man infected by polio He was not vaccinated against the disease and, it seems, he would have been infected outside the country. An isolated case does not imply risk for the public healthbut being a dangerous disease, especially for children, they indicated an investigation of possible contacts and the start of vaccination will be tried again.
But in the last two years, mainly due to the Covid pandemic and the lack of access to information and misinformation in many countries, there has been a continued decline in childhood vaccination, he recently warned. WHO and UNICEF.
The virus usually enters the body through the mouth on hands contaminated with feces from an infected person, or through saliva. Symptoms can be similar to those of the flu (tiredness, fever, headache, stiffness, muscle aches, and vomiting) and can take up to 30 days to manifest, during which time the infected person continues to transmit the virus.
Usually, 83% of babies globally had received three doses of the polio vaccine in 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
At this time, according to the Spanish scientific community, there are no indicators to show distrust or concern about an isolated case in the United States. However, after the assault again on the people of other viruses eradicated or under controlol, it is understood that any information causes concern, but in this case no alarm.
First immunization campaign
At work, The battle of Madrid for polio vaccines (1963): science, ideology and power in the first mass immunization campaign in Spain, José Tuells from the University of Alicantee, analyzes the convulsive first years in which vaccination was decided in Spain. Thus, explain that during the six-year period from 1958 to 1963, the period with the highest incidence of poliomyelitis was experienced in Spain (2000 cases and 200 deaths per year).
«Although Salk’s inactivated vaccine had arrived in the country in 1957, there was no determined government action to apply it to the entire susceptible population. Sabin’s attenuated vaccine, available in Europe since 1960, was also not implemented. While one or the other was adopted in the international context, in Spain the rivalry between the two vaccines was reproduced with a confusing result.
In this way, a low percentage of susceptibles was vaccinated with the Salk vaccine by the Compulsory Health Insurance (SOE), “at the same time as a group of researchers from the National School of Health, led by Florencio Pérez Gallardo (1917-2006), carried out a model epidemiological study that indicated the convenience of using the Sabin oral vaccine. By 1963, the SOE launched a national campaign with the Salk vaccine inspired by the pediatrician Juan Bosch Marín (1902-1995)».
The struggle to elucidate which type of vaccine was more convenient was staged in Madrid during the first months of 1963 at different scientific conferences. Bosch Marín’s group defended his campaign, while Pérez Gallardo did the same with the oral vaccine and got a hit by inviting Albert Sabin as a lecturer. At the end of the year, after a pilot campaign, the first massive oral vaccination campaign against polio was launched in Spain».
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