Polio Vaccines!!!!

So you’ve heard me talk before about how IMPORTANT it is to be vaccinated and to vaccinate your children. I know everyone hears about these vaccines and what the doctors tell them in regards to their health. However, not everyone knows just what makes up these injections. Our main focus for vaccines today is Polio. We’ll be discussing the two types of vaccinations and what current events have led to this discussion

Way back when, when smallpox was becoming a pandemic, two different vaccines were created that eventually almost cured the world. There were two types of polio vaccines established: OPV and IPV. OPV or Oral Polio Vaccine was a live vaccine in which an active strain of Polio was cultured and maintained for use as a vaccine. The other, Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) used a form of formaldehyde to inactivate several strains of polio. The use of these were going pretty well until the past few years, causing a necessary change to happen.

OPV has done amazingly well with providing preventative control of polio; however, it has one flaw. The strain that we attempt to use in vaccines mutates at an alarming rate due to a surplus of errors in what us the microbiology classroom call RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RDRP). Because of the mutations, a new virus is developing called Vaccine Derived Poliovirus (VDPV). This basically means that the virus is able to regain the power to infect cells and spread this virus in our bodies. But remember what I said before, vaccines are IMPORTANT. Steps are being taken to fix this problem. The world is slowly pulling back on the use of OPV and will hopefully transfer to complete vaccination using IPV by 2024. The number of vaccinated people will help this happen, as the shift must be delicate in order to prevent a spark in another outbreak. So, keep on vaccinating and saving lives.