By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Last week, the journal Science ran “U.S. departure from Afghanistan imperils global quest to eradicate polio.” The last natural case of smallpox was in 1977, and having eradicated this terrible disease from the world, we have long since stopped vaccinating our youth for smallpox. We likewise have vaccines for polio and have expected polio to also soon be extinct. So what has changed?
Older Americans will remember the mother’s “March of Dimes” that funded polio research. After World War II, the new medium of television showed adults in “iron lungs” and crippled children in braces. Our President Franklin Roosevelt was crippled by polio.
By using monkey tissue culture, Dr. Jonas Salk was able to develop a poliovirus vaccine that was inactivated by treatment with formaldehyde. Injection of this perfectly safe vaccine began in the mid-1950s. The public was relieved. I gladly took my shot, and later, a booster shot. Even when Cutter Lab released a bad batch of vaccine where the virus was not fully inactivated, it caused some polio cases. But the public knew the terror of the polio epidemic and had faith that the scientists would correct it.
Soon the Sabin vaccine—drops in sugar cubes—replaced the Salk shots. It was an “attenuated” or weakened virus that replicated in a person without causing polio. The recipient shed the virus and “vaccinated” those around them. This was even more effective in spreading protection. Polio was effectively eliminated from North and South America, Europe and East Asia.
In hopes of driving polio extinct, similar to smallpox, heroic efforts have been made to wipe it out in the remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in the past, health workers have been killed by various rebels under the belief that the vaccine is actually an attempt to sterilize them.
But times have changed. According to the Science article, “The Taliban has blocked house-to- house polio vaccination in areas under its reign for the past 3 years, putting up to 3 million children out of reach of the campaign and leaving Afghanistan one of only two countries, along with Pakistan, where the wild polio virus survives.”
“Cases in Afghanistan almost tripled to 56 between 2018 and 2020...” the article continues. However, members of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative are hopeful. They found that the Taliban is not opposed to polio vaccination, noting it has collaborated with the GPEI. Instead, the Taliban accuses vaccinators of providing the U.S. forces with information to target airstrikes that killed Taliban leaders.
Medical workers hope that an end to the conflict will remove that concern and aid their eradication efforts. The Taliban have been willing to keep vaccinations going where it can “select people it trusts” and administer vaccinations in mosques.
But a significant portion of Americans have no excuses for their anti-vaccination stance.
It is true that the success of science eliminates the very experience-base that led to the medical breakthroughs and the eradication of many infectious diseases. —There are no more iron-lung machines. --No more childhood leg braces. –No more children crippled from infantile paralysis. The terror of death or disfigurement from smallpox is no longer in most citizen’s living memory. We have lost the experience-base to know and fear measles and whooping cough and tetanus. Science in this way is self-defeating. It eliminates our terrible experiences with many diseases. But this pandemic has restored some experience with the trauma of horrible diseases.
Education should fill that missing role. But America continues to provide virtually no human anatomy or physiology education to high school students, compared to all other developed countries.
And America now has a vast wasteland of online misinformation that spreads anti-vax conspiracy theories.
If we had this lack of science education and the social media and the rapid diffusion of misinformation in the 1950s that we have today, we most likely would still be living with iron lungs, crippled children in braces, and thirty percent of smallpox victims still dying today.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.