Did you ever consider that human beings might have a breeding season? Birth seasonality exists – and has interesting implications for childhood disease outbreaks.
Nigerian children receiving the polio vaccine in Lagos.
EPA
Polio can be circulating through a community long before anyone is paralyzed. Monitoring sewage for the virus lets public health officials short-circuit this ‘silent transmission.’
Vaccinations have saved countless lives and untold suffering, even though many adults still believe vaccines are bad for their children.
Africa Studios/Shutterstock.com
Vaccines have long been considered safe, but many people still believe they are not. A new study shows that people who think they know more than medical experts are more likely to believe that vaccine are not safe.
What will it take to finish polio off in the last three countries where it persists?
AP Photo/B.K. Bangash
Pakistan had only eight new diagnoses of polio in 2017. The virus’ days look numbered – but health workers have their work cut out for them to eradicate the devastating disease once and for all.
The polio vaccination campaign in Nigeria is being hampered.
Flickr/Center for Disease Control
More than 788 health facilities have been destroyed in parts of North-Eastern Nigeria captured by Boko Haram insurgents, crippling health services in the area.
Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland, where a measles outbreak in 2015 led to children being sickened in several states.
Jae C. Hong/AP
You may not know anyone with an infectious disease covered by the immunizations on the 2017 list of recommended vaccines. Here’s why that doesn’t matter, and why children still need to be protected.
Nigerian women who formed part of the country’s previous polio immunisation campaign.
Global Polio Eradication Initiative
A new polio outbreak in Nigeria has hampered the country’s efforts to be declared polio free by 2017.
An Ethiopian boy receives a polio vaccination. Africa has done well with polio eradication but lags behind other vaccination efforts.
Unicef Ethiopia/2013/Sewunet
Every year hundreds of thousands of children die from vaccine-preventable diseases. Africa leaders could change this if they improved vaccination efforts.
As more vaccines have been developed, the challenge of delivering them with minimal pain and number of visits to the doctor has increased. Needle-free vaccinations might help.
Polio vaccinators carry boxes of polio vaccine drops as they head to the areas they have been appointed to administer the vaccine, in Karachi October 21 2014.
Akhtar Soomro/Reuters
Researchers are piloting a smartphone app to collect better information about who is getting vaccinated and to design better incentives for health workers on vaccination drives.
The oral vaccine is the most common polio vaccine used in the world.
S. Sabawoon/EPA/AAP
Recent polio outbreaks in Ukraine and Mali, caused by a vaccine-derived form of poliovirus, don’t mean the vaccine isn’t working. On the contrary, they are a reminder to keep up vaccination rates.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries that still have endemic levels of polio.
Parwiz/Reuters
Nigeria’s strategy to eliminate polio was so effective that it was duplicated to deal with ebola. So why did the country take so long to get off the list of polio-endemic countries?