Drinking a beer for her, she went to the high school very close by. I'm far too young to remember polio but still remember my grandparents talking about it. They had died of Covid-19 before her.
Something to remember by her is that the determination to live is something that keeps us going.
I often think about how nearly everyone in my parent's generation knew someone with polio, but I know nobody from my generation in the world who had polio
Her optimism and creativity to overcome the disability and live her life is powerfully inspirational.
I wish I could apply that optimism to my perception of a societal shift away from disability accomodations and the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy... Enabling parents to foster unvaccinated children is a guarantee that we'll get a resurgence of this type of disease.
I recommend everyone educate themselves on our immune system:
the book "Immune" (ISBN: 1529360684) introduces the vast complexity in a very approachable manner. Also the podcasts through MicrobeTV by Vincent Racaniello are excellent.
Read up on herd immunity. The problem isn't specifically 'foreigners' but the general question of whether enough people are vaccinated to prevent the disease from roaring back when it inevitably - it is not possible to stop people from bringing diseases into the country - reoccurs.
Because your entire premise here sort of betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept?
So we stop vaccinating people here, and require everyone that enters be vaccinated. Problem solved!
Except not really, because people here travel to foreign places. So also everyone that _leaves_ here needs to be vaccinated as well. But that's do-able.
Except, and here's the part where "herd immunity" is important: Being vaccinated doesn't prevent contracting the disease 100% of the time. The reason vaccines are effective isn't "you can never get the disease", it's because "if you get it, it can't spread to enough people to sustain itself into an outbreak".
If you require people traveling into or out of the country to be vaccinated and stop vaccinating at home, you're going to have someone bring polio back fairly quickly. The vaccine is not 100% effective, and polio is asymptomatic in about 75% of cases so many carriers wouldn't even know they have it.
In a vaccinated population, that's not a problem. The effective reproduction rate is <1. For every person infected, less than one other will contract it. It does out quickly.
In your unvaccinated population, the R0 is 5-7. For every person infected, five to seven others will be infected. The growth will explode quickly and given the rate of asymptomatic carriers there's no chance you're going to contain it.
(Also have you ever watched any zombie virus/fungus/etc show? Even if the vaccine is 100% effective, do you really want to hang the health of the whole country on nobody ever messing up vaccine administration, nobody lying, nobody faking paperwork, etc?)
So everyone has to be vaccinated anyway, and if they're all vaccinated anyway the risk of letting a potential carrier in is... pretty near nil in the grand scheme of things.
Your options are:
* Never let anyone in or out. (But honestly, it'll still probably get in. See: lying.)
* Eradicated the disease globally. We can do it, but less likely to happen now with USAID shut down.
* Vaccinate at home so when the disease gets in the country it doesn't spread.
Disappointing such basics of vaccine and disease spread theory have to be explained on HN, and you explained it very well.
The US is under such an enormous disinformation campaign. I don't know how we can immunize people against the BS they are assaulted with everyday. Too many people benefit from that gullibility and ignorance.
Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk.
The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of it will not cause paralysis, it can and occasionally does mutate back into a pathogenic variant.
So we're sort of maintaining a reservoir of polio, really.
Hopefully though we will slowly wean off the live vaccine. For the most part the live vaccine is only used in developing countries. There are a bunch of factors that make that difficult but i think eventually we will get there.
Well, "can" is debatable. The only one we've effectively eradicated is smallpox and that was almost 50 years ago. Of course we couldn't actually eradicate it, though, and kept samples for "research purposes".
Well also Rinderpest, but i suppose you meant human disease.
Personally i'd call smallpox as actually eradicated despite the samples. I think its fair to call other diseases effectively eradicated, even if they aren't total. If less than 10 people in the world are dying per year, that is effective eradication even if not total
Before the covid vaccination was available, I read that being recently vaccinated for polio reduces the covid risk by 5% or so. I thought what the heck, and was re-vaccinated for polio.
I went down the list and got re-vaccinated for the usual set of childhood vaccines, as their efficacy fades over time.
Wild bad luck. Polio and despite vaccination she got Covid not once but twice and died of sequelei! And recently married. That is like lightening striking, again and again and again and again.
It might be more of a weakened immune system thing. Everyone gets small lightning strikes all the times, but our defences stop it before it gets too bad. So when defences are failing, you see a long string of random unlucky stuff happening .
Same for computer services going down regularly, or sequences of small industrial accidents, or even humans being non-stop unlucky.
The Covid vaccination doesn't stop you getting Covid, it just on average reduces the severity of the infection. Covid is still producing multiple waves a year despite the vaccinations. You can still get Long Covid despite vaccination, and you can still die from Covid even if you are vaccinated, thousands do so every week.
Died of Long Covid. Been seeing a growing number of deaths in the Long Covid communities. There are >400 million people with Long Covid and growing in the world, if its lethal its going to be a lot of dead in the coming years.
Drinking a beer for her, she went to the high school very close by. I'm far too young to remember polio but still remember my grandparents talking about it. They had died of Covid-19 before her.
Something to remember by her is that the determination to live is something that keeps us going.
Her self-created obituary, if anyone’s curious: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/shawnee-ok/martha...
> Sorry, you have been blocked
Thanks, Cloudflare!
I often think about how nearly everyone in my parent's generation knew someone with polio, but I know nobody from my generation in the world who had polio
I'm reminded of the contributions of Naomi Wu. https://archive.org/details/youtube-4VKZTmTP7oY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Lillard
Her optimism and creativity to overcome the disability and live her life is powerfully inspirational.
I wish I could apply that optimism to my perception of a societal shift away from disability accomodations and the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy... Enabling parents to foster unvaccinated children is a guarantee that we'll get a resurgence of this type of disease.
I recommend everyone educate themselves on our immune system: the book "Immune" (ISBN: 1529360684) introduces the vast complexity in a very approachable manner. Also the podcasts through MicrobeTV by Vincent Racaniello are excellent.
Is he still doing TWIV?
Yes! https://open.spotify.com/show/6GifipQkBOoRzOpMxw3Xix
Perhaps we'll be great again soon.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-how-quickly...
its crazy that humankind can effectively end disease
We can, but if we’re not careful, it can come back.
After eradicating polio for decades, we saw a case for the first time in 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/
And given the drop in rates of immunization post covid, we can very expect more if the trend continues.
> suggesting an origin from the live attenuated oral polio vaccine
Without immunizations that would’nt have happened though?
[flagged]
Read up on herd immunity. The problem isn't specifically 'foreigners' but the general question of whether enough people are vaccinated to prevent the disease from roaring back when it inevitably - it is not possible to stop people from bringing diseases into the country - reoccurs.
[flagged]
Because your entire premise here sort of betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept?
So we stop vaccinating people here, and require everyone that enters be vaccinated. Problem solved!
Except not really, because people here travel to foreign places. So also everyone that _leaves_ here needs to be vaccinated as well. But that's do-able.
Except, and here's the part where "herd immunity" is important: Being vaccinated doesn't prevent contracting the disease 100% of the time. The reason vaccines are effective isn't "you can never get the disease", it's because "if you get it, it can't spread to enough people to sustain itself into an outbreak".
If you require people traveling into or out of the country to be vaccinated and stop vaccinating at home, you're going to have someone bring polio back fairly quickly. The vaccine is not 100% effective, and polio is asymptomatic in about 75% of cases so many carriers wouldn't even know they have it.
In a vaccinated population, that's not a problem. The effective reproduction rate is <1. For every person infected, less than one other will contract it. It does out quickly.
In your unvaccinated population, the R0 is 5-7. For every person infected, five to seven others will be infected. The growth will explode quickly and given the rate of asymptomatic carriers there's no chance you're going to contain it.
(Also have you ever watched any zombie virus/fungus/etc show? Even if the vaccine is 100% effective, do you really want to hang the health of the whole country on nobody ever messing up vaccine administration, nobody lying, nobody faking paperwork, etc?)
So everyone has to be vaccinated anyway, and if they're all vaccinated anyway the risk of letting a potential carrier in is... pretty near nil in the grand scheme of things.
Your options are:
* Never let anyone in or out. (But honestly, it'll still probably get in. See: lying.)
* Eradicated the disease globally. We can do it, but less likely to happen now with USAID shut down.
* Vaccinate at home so when the disease gets in the country it doesn't spread.
Disappointing such basics of vaccine and disease spread theory have to be explained on HN, and you explained it very well.
The US is under such an enormous disinformation campaign. I don't know how we can immunize people against the BS they are assaulted with everyday. Too many people benefit from that gullibility and ignorance.
You could, but if you have herd immunity, you don't need to, and if you don't have herd immunity, it's a losing battle.
Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk.
The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of it will not cause paralysis, it can and occasionally does mutate back into a pathogenic variant.
So we're sort of maintaining a reservoir of polio, really.
Hopefully though we will slowly wean off the live vaccine. For the most part the live vaccine is only used in developing countries. There are a bunch of factors that make that difficult but i think eventually we will get there.
Source?
Not OP, but this is fairly common knowledge. Here's a reliable source - search the page for VAPP: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-detail...
Thanks.
Well, "can" is debatable. The only one we've effectively eradicated is smallpox and that was almost 50 years ago. Of course we couldn't actually eradicate it, though, and kept samples for "research purposes".
Well also Rinderpest, but i suppose you meant human disease.
Personally i'd call smallpox as actually eradicated despite the samples. I think its fair to call other diseases effectively eradicated, even if they aren't total. If less than 10 people in the world are dying per year, that is effective eradication even if not total
let me know in a few years what the last polio patient is doing.
[flagged]
Making polio great again.
Before the covid vaccination was available, I read that being recently vaccinated for polio reduces the covid risk by 5% or so. I thought what the heck, and was re-vaccinated for polio.
I went down the list and got re-vaccinated for the usual set of childhood vaccines, as their efficacy fades over time.
Wild bad luck. Polio and despite vaccination she got Covid not once but twice and died of sequelei! And recently married. That is like lightening striking, again and again and again and again.
It might be more of a weakened immune system thing. Everyone gets small lightning strikes all the times, but our defences stop it before it gets too bad. So when defences are failing, you see a long string of random unlucky stuff happening .
Same for computer services going down regularly, or sequences of small industrial accidents, or even humans being non-stop unlucky.
The Covid vaccination doesn't stop you getting Covid, it just on average reduces the severity of the infection. Covid is still producing multiple waves a year despite the vaccinations. You can still get Long Covid despite vaccination, and you can still die from Covid even if you are vaccinated, thousands do so every week.
And a good day to you, sir!
Have you ever heard of a little Show called Branded, Dude?
https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=the-big-lebowski_1998_1264&tex...
Context: https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=the-big-lebowski_1998_1297&tex...
Bulk of the series
Died of Long Covid. Been seeing a growing number of deaths in the Long Covid communities. There are >400 million people with Long Covid and growing in the world, if its lethal its going to be a lot of dead in the coming years.
...she was in a iron lung. How are you at extrapolating the heigh of a baby in a few years?