Episode 499: Polio: The Paralytic Pandemic
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On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we get all pandemic on you and talk about Polio. Famous for causing paralysis and death through the first half the century (most notably in the US and UK), this disease goes back to ancient Egypt. Two doctors created different vaccines for the disease in the 1950s and 60s and largely set the path toward the vaccine schedule that is used in modern medicine. However, with that came complications such as the Cutter Incident where the vaccine itself paralyzed kids. And what about the rumors of the vaccine causing cancer or even the new polio like disease spreading in America?
Polio is a horrible disease caused by three different viruses. It spreads most notably through the brown highway, aka, the fecal-oral route. The virus does its thing in the intestines, so your poop is filled with Polio if you are infected, and if that somehow makes it into someone’s mouth, well there it is. Though it sounds gross, in areas with natural rivers as water sources, this would be a common spread. It can also spread oral to oral, but that is less likely.
Polio is a trip because it can be asymptomatic to symptoms like a cold with bad body aches. Then, for the one percent, it can cause permanent paralysis of muscles and permanent muscle atrophy. It can even kill if it affects someone’s ability to breathe, swallow, or regulate mucus. But two vaccines came to the rescue. The first was invented by Jonas Salk, who created one based on dead Polio virus, and Albert Sabin who created one based on live virus that was mutated to, you know, not kill us.
The Sabin style oral vaccine is what the WHO uses to this day, and it does have one side effect which is vaccine bleed. In fact, in recent years, naturally occurring polio has had fewer cases than polio caused by otherwise healthy people who bleed the Polio virus out of their bodies after they got the vaccine. There is also the case of the Cutter Incident, where one lab infected 200,000 Americans with a vaccine that gave them Polio. While Polio is often held up as the ideal disease that a vaccine can cure, many use things like the bleed and the Cutter Incident as a warning of what could go wrong with vaccines. Where do you fall? And is there any trough to the rumors that monkey cells in the early vaccine can cause cancer? Listen, laugh, learn.
Visit Our Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio
https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/index.htm
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/post-polio-syndrome/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#The_Cutter_incident
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/95/7/532/2520688
https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/jonas-salk-and-albert-bruce-sabin
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