The strongest weapon in the fight against human infectious diseases is vaccination. However, their use meets with reluctance, in both poor and rich countries. In this respect, traffic new anti vaccinated enthusiasts put on a par with the Islamists and the illiterate people in developing countries.
Despite the development of new drugs, access to them in developing countries is limited, and most viral diseases gathers a rich harvest. The problem is the lack of money, often including logistics and infrastructure, the lack of which prevents the delivery of drugs to anyone who needs them.
Eradication Action
One of the biggest campaigns in the history of public health was an action for polio eradication militis. In the fight against disease, the point is, so to raise the level of immunity in humans, the virus has been deprived by the human host. Polio virus, like any other, a few strands of genetic material in the coat protein. He can not live alone, so penetrates to other cells. Sometimes it gets to the spine, causing spinal damage and paralysis.
Most people have symptoms of the common cold, but the virus is "alive" in their gut, and then transferred together with the feces. Droppings from the virus can get into open sewers. Water from the sewage gets into the wells and is used as drinking water. Most children infected with the virus do not suffer, but unknowingly spreads the disease.
One of the problems faced by epidemiologists, is a high density of people in poor urban neighborhoods. In such conditions, the virus can quickly spread. The omission of the children may be jeopardized by preventive action. Therefore, and performed in October 2004, India assumed that within two days szczepiących 2 million a drug administered to all children under 5 years of age. The campaign covered 165 million children.
Consent for vaccination
It turned out that overcoming logistical barriers is not the only problem. Muslim religious leaders in northern India Aligarhu believed that polio vaccine causes sterility and warned fellow, often uneducated, poor people, not to let their children vaccinated. The result - paralysis.
Similar problems requiring przłamania cultural or religious resistance met in Nigeria, where authorities have banned the use of the vaccine. As a result, in a country where his time was left only a few cases of the disease, by 2004 there were again over 600, representing 80 percent of all cases in the world.
The disease began to spread from Nigeria to countries not previously performed, including to Chad, Central African Republic, the Sudan, causing the outbreak.
Head of the polio eradication program on behalf of WHO David Heymann asked for help from Islamic leaders who have made them send the vaccine to the laboratory in Muslim Indonesia. As Indonesia has confirmed that the vaccine does not contain harmful agents, Nigerian clerics opened the door for volunteers from Rotary International and UNICEF, who provided a vaccine for polio-infected regions.
At present, there has been a less and less cases of the disease. Mastery of this epidemic would not be possible, if not millions of parents chose to vaccinate their children against polio. Although there are still outbreaks of epidemics. In September this year. WHO reported cases of the disease in Pakistan, mainly due to suspension of vaccination campaigns.
Since the vaccinia vaccine
The beginnings of a revolution in the fight against infectious diseases dates back to the experiments of English physician who in 1796 discovered how to prevent one of the most deadly diseases then - smallpox. Applied before indexation - preventive smallpox infection of healthy people - it was not perfect - before the disease has passed, the person vaccinated could infect further.
Edward Jenner trail followed the folk belief that a history of human cowpox immunization against the disease smallpox, as evidenced by a milking machine. Their hands showed signs of vaccinia, but not had smallpox. Jenner took oil from the pustules on krowiance from milking it and applied the skin incision of the young James Phipps.
This had to call a boy a harmless form of vaccinia. To see if the boy has become resistant to smallpox, brought James to the victims of smallpox. Medical theory was right. Jenner called his discovery vaccin, from the Latin medical name cowpox - variola vaccina.
Almost 100 years later an Englishman experiment to check for other germs, Louis Pasteur. First, he managed to produce a vaccine against chicken cholera. an experimental vaccine against rabies.
But only in the twentieth century, scientists understand the mechanism of action. Vaccines do not destroy viruses, bacteria and antibiotics. They can mobilize defenses that he fought against the virus. When the vaccine virus invades the body's immune system mobilizes two defenders.
First, the protein antibodies attach themselves to the virus is not allowing him to enter the cell. If, however, the virus invades the interior, the immune system sends a second fighter, cytotoxic T lymphocytes. They destroy cells infected with the virus trapped in the middle. The vaccine contains a weakened virus, so the human immune system wins easily with them.
We do not know how the disease
When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine by injection, and Albert Salin has created its oral version, many countries have carried out mass vaccinations, which almost caused mass crippling disease. In the Western world one of the most famous victims of the disease was the U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
With the creation of vaccines against such diseases as diphtheria, mumps and measles epidemics past begin to fade.
The reluctance to vaccination is not limited to poor countries and religious opponents. Epidemiologist Bill Foege says the behavior of supporters to avoid vaccination: - This follows from the fact that parents do not know how they look these diseases and therefore do not fear them. Difficult for them to feel that something prevents, while we do not encounter the disease.
Rx for Survival, A Global Health Challenge, 2005, Dr. Jonas Salk and polio - The Impossible cured, The Time, July 26, 2011, Bonnie A. Maybury Okonek, L. Morganstein, Development of polio vaccines, F. Fleck, West Africa polio campaign boycotted by Nigerian states, BMJ 328:485, February 2004.
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