gwern comments on On Charities and Linear Utility - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Anatoly_Vorobey 04 February 2011 02:13PM

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Comment author: gwern 05 February 2011 08:24:55PM *  -1 points [-]

No, may. Even if you have zero known cases, you have not eradicated polio for sure because of the carriers and natural reservoirs and obscure little hidden villages. So you still need vaccines. And your own links point out that the attenuated vaccine can still be infectious!

This is believed to be a rare event, but outbreaks of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) have been reported, and tend to occur in areas of low coverage by OPV, presumably because the OPV is itself protective against the related outbreak strain.

To quote from one of the references:

The rate and pattern of VP1 divergence among the circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV) isolates suggested that all lineages were derived from a single OPV infection that occurred around 1983 and that progeny from the initiating infection circulated for approximately a decade within Egypt along several independent chains of transmission.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 February 2011 07:31:59AM 0 points [-]

What is a "contaminated natural source"? I am genuinely curious.

Comment author: gwern 06 February 2011 04:53:36PM -1 points [-]

A variation on natural reservoir.