Quick Post: Some Good News
01 Sep 2020
Hi! This here is what I’m going to start calling “quick posts”: just sharing some things I’ve found interesting lately with a minimal amount of commentary. Enjoy!
“Africa Declared Free from Polio”, from Nature
The polio vaccine was probably the first example of a vaccine that I was taught about in a history class. The African continent being officially declared free of the wild poliovirus is a huge step forward and an awesome piece of news for the inbox inundated with less fortunate virus news.
There’s some fascinating bioethics that was involved in the process as mentioned in the article. There’s been a lot of thought lately about how different cultures handle public health, related to perceptions of authority, communication modalities, and dozens of other sociological concepts. I definitely want to learn more about how the practice of medicine depends on scale and community.
One last thought: one of the mentioned barriers to eradication was attitudes towards vaccinations. Interestingly enough, the form of polio still left in most of the world is vaccine-derived, the result of oral-drop vaccines containing weakened strains mutating in the body and resulting in illness. The solution to this is more widespread immunization, which is awfully counterintuitive. I wonder if there will be lessons to be learned from the fight against polio to apply to the eventual coronavirus vaccine drive.
The mosquito strategy that could eliminate dengue, from Nature
This is just super cool. Researchers interested in dengue fever started working in the 90’s on creating mosquito populations which carry a bacteria that prevents the spread of viruses including dengue virus. There have been a variety of studies and tests done before, but a study begun in Indonesia in 2016 has just wrapped up and published results that show an incredible reduction in dengue fever as a result of releasing these mosquitos in cities. The data is as yet unpublished, and while there is still much to be discovered from the study many epidemiologists are extremely excited about the potential of the technique. Some economists have said it will pay for itself from reduced healthcare costs and avoided lost working hours as a result of infection. The WHO still needs to reccomend the intervention, but lots of people have high hopes, and now some of the evidence to justify it.