A 3-month-old infant receives the oral polio vaccine in Rugan Fulani, Nigeria CDC PUBLIC HEALTH IMAGE LIBRARYResearchers at Britain’s National Institute for Biological Standards and Control have engineered attenuated strains of the poliovirus that could safer alternatives to those used in today’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), whose production involves the growth of highly virulent virus. The new strains, which tested well in mice, could provide a solution to that biosafety risk, according to the scientists, who published their results last week (December 31) in PLOS Pathogens.
“I’m impressed. I didn’t expect this to happen, certainly [not] this quickly,” Neal Halsey, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore who was not involved in the work, told STAT News.
The global polio eradication campaign has succeeded in dramatically reducing the disease burden—from more than 350,000 cases in 1988, when the World Health Organization (WHO) passed a resolution to eradicate polio, to less than 2,000 per year since the turn of the century. One hurdle in finishing the job is that the available vaccines are imperfect. The oral polio vaccine (OPV) uses live attenuated virus that is shed in the children’s stool, and risks spreading if a virus mutates to become infectious once again. ...
