Polio found to be back, in London, after 40 years.

Chestnut, my post directly addressed the subjects mentioned in effalumps post, but nothing else. This is why I addressed it to her.

Yes we face lots of problems, but that's life.

The one thing I would query in your list is population. Except for Africa, most countries in the world have birthrate around the replacement level. The world birthrate is 2.4 live children per family and many are much lower, and falling.
data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN. The cause of population growth, is not excess births. That problem has to all intents and purposes been dealt with.

The main cause of growing population now, is growth is the number of older people living far longer than in the past www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/ageing/WPA2017_Highlights.pdf This will stabilise when we, as the generation who are living much longer than our grandparents, die and average age at death stabilises.

Only a fool would deny that we're going through a bad patch. If you happened to live in some other countries which are suffering civil wars, bush fires, flooding, tsunamis, crop failures, toad and mouse infestations, meglomaniac leaders, Ebola, Zika, hurricanes etc etc, you'd be used to these kind of crises. I think we usually ignore what's going on in the rest of the world. Implying that there's some kind of conspiracy by an imagined world controller is ridiculous.

MOnica The current period is exceptional because we have much more to contend with. I'd like to add to your list:

8/ Climate crisis resulting in global warming which will affect food supplies and loss of wildlife including bees.

9/ Overpopulation of the world.

10/ The internet, particularly the use of smartphones. They have changed everything, both for good and for bad.

Those three things make the 21st century a very different place to the previous period.

My uncle contracted polio when he was a little boy. I remember my grandmother telling me about the shock and the awful feeling when she noticed something was up. It clearly haunted her for life. She remembered word for word. My uncle was lucky but was left with a withered leg and problems with walking all his life but he led a very full life all the same unlike those poor souls in the scary iron lungs.

Sensible post M0nica, thank you for putting things in perspective.
It does however highlight one thing - finding a record of one’s childrens vaccination history , as well as one’s own. My D recently had to ask me for confirmation of childhood vaccinations before she starts a new course of treatment and other than what I could remember, I could find no record.
Oh for those “little books” we had for our babies!

*effalump8

1) There has yet to be a single case of polio

2) We know why samples of polio were found in material going through a sewage facility. Some countries still use cheap vaccines that contain live, but attenuated polio bacteria and this can be secreted through the bowels into the sewage system.

3) The authorities have been finding this material in sewage every so often for decades. It is just that they have had three positive results in a relatively short period

4) In all the years, and they are many, they have been finding this fragments of polio bacteria in the water, no one has caught the disease.

5) We know what caused the war in Ukraine and that was a madman in the Kremlin wanting to recreate the Russia of Peter the Great and the increase in food prices and some scarcity is caused because Ukraine was a major supplier of wheat and Putin has deliberately disrupted this supply

6) I accept that you may see these multiple crises as unprecedented in your lifeline, but you are being naive, if you think WW2 did not cause an immense crisis in this country. Identity cards were introduced, travel was restricted.
Read Vera Brittain's book 'England's Hour', published in 1941. Written when we had real fears we might lose the war.

7) Go back a hundred years, we had WW!, followed by a pandemic and then general ecnomic collapse. The current time is not exceptiona.l

More on the polio vaccine:
www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-duration-protection.html
This indicates you need four doses to be 99% protected from polio, and it is not clear how long the protection lasts. In my case it was one dose 67 years ago, so is it likely that current polio strains are the same as all those years ago?

Another article explains that some virus are very stable (measles, polio) and don't mutate much if at all, so protection lasts a long time. Others mutate very quickly ('flu, covid) and therefore a vaccine cannot protect very well against the new variants and needs to be given more frequently.

It seems as though the polio vaccine does not last a lifetime and we need a booster. Mine was in the 1950s. Children now have several doses.
www.nhs.uk/conditions/polio/
1/ You need to have all of these vaccinations to be fully vaccinated against polio.
2/ You should also get vaccinated even if you've had polio before as it protects against different types of polio.

Why do none of you question why we have had three viruses in just over two years, covid, monkeypox and now Polio. We're also watching the 'war' between Ukraine an Russia and then, of course, there's the food shortages and the meteoric rise in inflation and the possibility of global starvation. In all my life (over 60 years) I've never seen so many crises happen in such a short time. Even during the second world war, when building were bombs, nothing completely shut down. Oh, and by the way, Bill Gates did a TedTalk in 2015 saying the next virus would be a corona virus and we were not ready for that pandemic and then in 2019 he did an interview saying the next virus would 'most likely' be a smallpox type. Coincidence? You have got to start joining up the dots people!

I was. playing with a friend the day before she became ill with Polio. She was in an isolation hospital away from family, She was in an iron lung and then was encased in plaster like you have on a broken limb. I was told that she had weights hung over the end of the bed and attached to her legs . I visited her when she eventually came home, still encased in plaster with a metal bar between her legs so her mother could lift her.
Having seen her suffering and how she was eventually able to get around with callipers on her legs. I have always been a vociferous advocate of polio vaccinations to anyone who has young children.

I remember polio from the 1950s. There were posters everywhere. We would go to the beach on sundays and mum would have a nightmare if we needed to visit public loos etc. I had my sugar lump later that summer and she breathed a sigh of relief. Had a friend who age 10 was in an iron lung for ages then died. I also had measles and whooping cough prior to this and didn’t go to school for nearly a year. Mum did well but it mustn’t have been pleasant. My children were fully vaccinated and so are grandchildren. We learnt by experience and tend to agree those who are against vaccinations just don’t know the consequences or have lived through this.

We went to Uganda on a safari holiday in January 2020 and needed a polio booster - amongst others including MMR. I think as a precautionary measure because vaccination rates are low there so these diseases are still around. Still well worth going, its a beautiful country.

I had a vaccination for DiptherTetanus/Polio as an adult it only lasted 10 years I'm due another as I'm visiting some Caribbean countries later this year. I would suspect that whilst the childhood diseases were rare we wouldn't need them unless visiting countries where they night still be around. So unvaccinated children are putting other children and adults at risk now.

Does anyone know if people who had their vaccinations many years ago need a booster? I’m pretty sure that there was only one, and no boosters in the fifties

The low uptake of the polio vaccine is only in London. Elsewhere it is around 95%.

A relation had polio in the 40s and developed Post-Polio Syndrome in later life, with pain and some weakness in his leg. Horrible disease.

The length of immunity from different vaccines depends on various things, including whether the virus mutates a lot, like flu and covid, or not, like polio. I think polio vaccine is one which does give lifelong immunity, but then it became available in the 50s, I think, so some of us who had it then have not reached the end of our lives!

Anti-vaxxers who cause rates of uptake to fall have, like Andrew Wakefield (as Chocolatelovinggran says), a lot to answer for too. What do they gain from preventing other people's children from having the protection of vaccines?

maddyone, my understanding is that we have lifelong immunity from childhood vaccination. Others may know more than me.

Good question maddyone. I’m sure one of the brilliant GN community will come back with an answer.

Do the vaccines we all received as children continue to protect us all these years later?

Andrew Wakefield has a lot to answer for and is still happily spreading his anti vaccine message in America. I fear for parents who will come to regret listening to him.

It is know.. I remember a patient who became infected, they had not been vaccinated and he picked it up from his baby's nappy.

I had polio as a child - very mildly fortunately and when the vaccination came out I was there with my arm at the ready. It was the day when our school danced around the Maypole and the air smelled of the vaccine!!!

Yes, I've got an older friend who had it, as a child. She had to attend a "special school", and she dealt with it pretty well.

But, now, in old age, she's developed Post Polio Syndrome - which is causing breathing problems, and limb problems, and she is becoming more and more incapacitated.

It's an awful disease - and it's a great shame it's come back.?

Israel are reporting new cases, and Nigeria and the Middle East have ongoing problems with it.

Hopefully, it can be contained - but people need to get their children vaccinated.

I think it’s wrong to put the emphasis on folks ‘bringing it in’ from countries using live vaccines. This has always been the case. The reason it’s causing a problem now is because routine childhood vaccine uptake is so low - apparently as low as 70% in some parts of London. In the past the ‘vaccine-induced virus’ had nowhere to go; it couldn’t find a host because almost everyone had been vaccinated against it so it simply disappeared. Now this isn’t the case and, as previously mentioned, all these childhood illnesses are re-appearing. And they are awful diseases! Get children vaccinated against them!!!

"The virus will have travelled from someone’s toilet to the treatment works where it was detected.
Not through our waterways."

When they found this in the sewage will they have stopped dumping sewage in the waterways from that sewage works? If not, this is in our waterways thanks to the polluting policy of this government.