Live Long and Prosper
7:40 PMFollow my blog with Bloglovin
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, so of course I had to walk around all day in the dress I bought because it looked like a Starfleet uniform.
Dress: Modiste
Shoes: Nine West
If Starfleet existed, you can bet
I'd enlist as a member of Starfleet medical and be a science officer. One day
I'll pin my Starfleet badge on this dress and wear it to a con, but til then
it's a work dress. It's supposed to be a bodycon dress, but even the XS is a
little bit loose on me, which makes me happy because it means that even though
it's a bit short it's still relatively work appropriate (with a blazer,
especially). The only thing I don't like about the dress is that despite the
coolness and ease of a front zipper, when I walk or sit the zipper bunches up
awkwardly, in a way not unlike the zipper of my boy’s uniform pants bunched up
in high school. It’s annoying, and though not quite annoying enough to stop me
from wearing the dress I probably won’t buy another dress with the same silhouette
if it has a front zipper.
Since I’m already on the subject
of the future, and since in last week’s post I briefly discussed infant
mortality, which was the bulk of what we discussed in class this week, I’d like
to delve into what the future of global maternal and child health might look
like. Last week I asked where we were in the timeline of MCH, and though I
still don’t know the answer to that question because I can’t predict the future,
I’d like to mention something currently happening in the field that demonstrates
how much progress we’ve made over the past few decades and hint at where we
might be a few decades from now.
Over the past year and a half or
so, I’ve been closely following the progress of polio eradication. I watched with
excitement as Nigeria was removed from the list of countries with circulating
wild polio virus in 2015 and then with dismay as two cases were reported last
month. However, the one thing that I’ve been anticipating the most took place
in April of this year.
In April, a global move was made
to discontinue administration of the trivalent oral polio vaccine and replace
it with the bivalent oral polio vaccine. Think for a minute about what this
means.
There are three types of wild
poliovirus: type 1, type 2, and type 3. The trivalent vaccine provides
protection against all three types; the bivalent vaccine only protects against
types 1 and 3. No cases of wild poliovirus type 2 have been detected since
1999, and in 2015 it was announced that wild poliovirus type 2 has been eradicated.
This means that there are now only two circulating types of wild poliovirus,
and the reasoning behind eliminating vaccination for type 2 is that there were
more cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 than wild poliovirus type 2.
(The term vaccine-derived poliovirus is a bit confusing. It doesn’t mean that
the people who have been vaccinated still get polio. It means that those who
have been vaccinated are excreting the virus and can spread it to the
unvaccinated, usually in areas of poor sanitation. This can happen when someone
has been vaccinated with the oral polio vaccine, which contains a live
attenuated – or weakened – virus.*) The vaccine-derived viruses can circulate
when not enough people are being vaccinated to provide herd immunity.
By mid-May of this year all
countries reported that they had stopped administration of the trivalent oral
polio vaccine. Now, the WHO is recommending that in countries where the polio
vaccine is administered, inactivated poliovirus vaccine be given alongside the
bivalent oral polio vaccine. This is because the inactivated vaccine protects
against type 2 paralytic polio, and there is less of a chance of circulating
the virus because it reduces the amount of viral shedding and boosts immunity
to poliovirus types 1 and 3.**
We are so close to eradicating
polio I can almost feel it. Of course, there’s still a long way to go –
Pakistan and Afghanistan still have wild poliovirus transmission – and there
are still gaps in surveillance and resistance to vaccination. Even so, a decade
from now we might be able to say that we’ve eradicated two human diseases:
smallpox and polio.
According to NASA, we are a
projected 15-20 years from getting humans to Mars. There are currently humans
living in space on an international space station. Human tissue can be 3D
printed, there’s a pill that can prevent HIV, and we might just be a few years
from completely eliminating wild circulation of a virus that has paralyzed and
killed so many. I don’t know about you,
but I feel like I’m living in the future already. So, to anyone reading this
right now I wish you well and have one thing to say: Live long and prosper.
* "What is vaccine-derived polio?" World Health Organization. 2015.
** "Cessation of Trivalent Oral Polio Vaccine and Introduction of Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine - Worldwide 2016" CDC. 2016.
FACT OF THE DAY!
Curiosity sang "Happy Birthday" to itself on its first birthday. One year after it landed on Mars, on August 5, 2013, the Mars rover Curiosity used its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument to sing "Happy Birthday" to itself.
source: NASA
photocred for this post goes out to my SO, who also loves Star Trek
photocred for this post goes out to my SO, who also loves Star Trek
0 comments