Polio Vaccine Fails in India due to Polluted Drinking Water

by Michael Belkin
The Refusers

This Bloomberg article reveals that the polio vaccine is a failure in India. The vaccine is ‘failing to work’ in kids getting as many as 15 doses of Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) in one of the most expensive public health campaign flops in history ($9 billion).

What do you expect when these poor people are drinking contaminated water and walking barefoot through raw sewage? The number one lesson that any first-year public health student should know by heart is that clean water and sanitation were the primary solution for the eradication of formerly-common infectious diseases in developed countries. A prime example is London. Londoners used to get cholera due to fecal contamination of drinking water (as recently as 1855). London had an infant mortality rate of 50%. Dr. John Snow figured out that cholera was being transmitted by sewage-contaminated drinking water. The British Parliament allocated funds to a sewage system built by chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette. End of problem.

You might think that if authorities could figure out the basic relationship between contaminated water and infectious disease 160 years ago, modern-day public health officials would be able to see the same problem in developing countries today and apply the solution (sewers and clean water). You would be wrong.

Instead we have a cabal of vaccine fanatics, led by Bill Gates, GAVI and the World Health Organization (WHO) who insist on inflicting never-ending vaccination programs on poor people who lack clean drinking water and sewers. This Bloomberg article reveals that (surprise, surprise) their vaccine programs are failing.

Not only are they failing, but vaccine adverse reactions may have caused ‘47,500 new cases of “non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP)” in children reported in 2011.’ NPAFP is ‘clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly’ and is ‘directly proportional [i.e. casually linked] to doses of oral polio received.’

The billions of dollars spent on failing vaccine programs is wasted and should have been spent on clean drinking water and sewage systems. Bill Gates’ vision of eliminating disease by vaccinated every child in the world repeatedly is an abject failure and the product of a deranged, misguided and megalomaniacal public health tyrant.

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Extra Food Means Nothing to Stunted Kids With Bad Water: Health

Bloomberg
June 12, 2013

Scientists increasingly suspect that constant exposure to bacteria, virus and parasite-laden fecal contaminants may be frustrating attempts to end malnutrition. In effect, the best diet-based measures to fight chronic hunger in the developing world are being negated by a failure to meet basic human needs: clean water and sanitation …

About 200,000 children under 4 years die in India annually because of diarrheal diseases caused by dirty water and lack of proper sanitation, according to a study published in the Lancet medical journal in April …

Water from communal taps in even India’s biggest cities carries health risks. Eighteen percent of samples tested at more than 600 sites in New Delhi were tainted by E. coli, Salmonella, or other disease-causing bacteria found in human excreta, according to a 2011 survey by the capital’s government. Two of 50 samples contained bacteria resistant to all commonly used antibiotics, a study published in the Lancet in 2011 found.

Polio Vaccine

The gastrointestinal damage caused by contaminated water could also explain why some vaccines fail to work in children in developing countries, according to Myron Levine, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland. Since the 1960s, there have been more than a dozen reports of polio, rotavirus, and cholera vaccines failing in patients in India, Brazil, Peru, Bangladesh and other countries where sanitation lapses have been reported.

Vaccine failure is particularly problematic for polio, a viral scourge that continues to cripple children despite being the focus of one of the most expensive public health campaigns in history — $9 billion to date. Children in India and the rest of South Asia need more doses of the vaccine compared with their western counterparts, and the vaccine fails in a “far higher” proportion of kids, said Nicholas Grassly, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, who has studied the efficacy of polio vaccine for the past eight years.

Gut Infections

“There is increasing evidence that oral polio vaccine failure is the result of exposure to other gut infections,” Grassly said in an interview. Places that have poor sanitation and environments that favor transmission of enteric pathogens are likely venues for vaccine failure, he said. Consequently, vaccines are less likely to protect children when administered in the rainy season or other times when diarrhea is rampant.

Oral vaccines, like the ones for polio and rotavirus, work in the intestine by training the body’s immune system to identify and kill their viral causes. In children with environmental enteropathy, the immune response is so well primed to fight gut infections that the live, but weakened virus is attacked before it has a chance to replicate in the gastrointestinal tract. Replication of the vaccine virus is an important step in generating protective antibodies.

Children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the Indian states where sanitation deficiencies are among the country’s worst, need an average of 15 doses of polio vaccine, compared with 10 doses in the rest of India. Only three shots are usually needed in developed nations.

Read the Full Article at Bloomberg

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Full Blog Post at The Refusers

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