The health benefits associated with relatively recent advances in vaccine therapy are well documented. To mention just a few: in 1921 there were nearly 207,000 reported cases of diphtheria in the United States. In 1991, there were two. In the same year, apart from a small number (five to ten) of vaccine-associated cases, there were no reported cases of poliomyelitis, as compared with more than ...

BACKGROUND At the present time, in Brazil and other countries in the Americas, the only cases of paralytic poliomyelitis due to poliovirus are caused by vaccine strains. The recognition of possible determinants of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) by public health surveillance and immunization programmes is relevant to inform the debate on criteria for case definition and vaccin...

Despite high polio vaccine coverage, Israel recently experienced a silent surge in the transmission of wild poliovirus in the population. In this issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Shulman and colleagues report interesting data about the antigenic and pathogenic features of the poliovirus strain circulating in that country. Poliovirus, the causative agent of poliomyelitis, replicates mainly...

Poliomyelitis has afflicted humankind since antiquity, and for nearly a century now, we have known the causative agent, poliovirus. This pathogen is an enterovirus that in recent history has been the source of a great deal of human suffering. Although comparatively small, its genome is packed with sufficient information to make it a formidable pathogen. In the last 20 years the Global Polio Era...

Early in 1961 a city-wide oral poliomyelitis vaccination program was under-taken in the city of Middletown, Connecticut by the and his staff. A description of various aspects of this so-called mass vaccination project follows in the papers that make up this issue of THE YALE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE. In the Middletown program some 10,000 children under the age of 18 received oral poliovi...

The African Region of the World Health Organization includes a diverse membership of 48 countries and territories that has made substantial progress toward controlling poliomyelitis. The coverage with three doses of oral poliovirus vaccine among 1-year-old children reached 58% in 1995, a substantial increase from 49% in 1993, and the incidence of poliomyelitis decreased from 5126 cases in 1980 ...

During replication, oral polio vaccine (OPV) can revert to neurovirulence and cause paralytic poliomyelitis. In individual vaccinees, it can acquire specific revertant point mutations, leading to vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP). With longer replication, OPV can mutate into vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV), which causes poliomyelitis outbreaks similar to those caused by wild p...

In 2010, a large outbreak of poliomyelitis with unusual 47% lethality occurred in Pointe Noire, Republic of Congo. Vaccine-mediated immunity against the outbreak virus was never investigated. A wild poliovirus 1 (WPV1) isolated from a fatal case (termed PV1-RC2010) showed a previously unknown combination of amino acid exchanges in critical antigenic site 2 (AgS2, VP1 capsid protein positions 22...

In 1978 the Government of India decided to use oral polio vaccine (OPV) to control polio, occurring then at the average rate of 500 cases per day (2). The primary vaccination schedule was three doses in infancy. The prevailing popular belief (based on theory, not evidence) was that vaccine viruses would spread in the community, immunise unvaccinated children, induce high herd effect, and contro...