The good war: against polio

Poliomyelitis is a terrible disease. While I can happily say I have never seen a fresh case, I have seen the long term consequences many times: useless legs, paralysis from the neck down; in my early career I used to see burnt out polio cases all the time.
          There hasn't been a new case of polio in the UK for over forty years, in no small part due to the highly successful immunization campaign, in which I played a small part. I have personally protected thousands of babies, first using the groundbreaking Salk vaccine, then the even better drops-in-the-mouth Sabin vaccine.
          Thus was not always the case. One of my earliest memories is hearing on the radio weekly bulletins on the number of new polio cases that week, 200, 300, sometimes more. But polio has remained common in the developing world. Then Bill Gates and his wife started spending literally billions of dollars in attempting to vaccinate every at risk child. It nearly worked, but last year there were 37 cases reported in the world, all of them in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Not many compared to the millions of cases per year not so long ago, but still too many. And over the weekend, 190,000 vaccinators prepared a massive frontal assault against the implacable foe, aiming to vaccinate no less than 116 million children, mainly in Africa. Please God it will make a difference.

When I was 12 years old there was a smallpox outbreak in South Wales and I remember every child in our school being vaccinated against the disease. Except me. I suffered from severe eczema at the time and this is a contra-indication to using the vaccine: if vaccinated such people will actually develop smallpox in all the areas they experience eczema, which would have been a significant percentage of my body surface, a condition known as eczema vaccinatum. This is usually fatal.
          WHO and the UN mounted a massive war against smallpox in the 70s which led to the last case being reported, in Ethiopia, in 1977. There hasn't been a reported case since, with the exception of an unlucky technician in a laboratory in Birmingham of all places.

There is a message here for all parents, wherever they are (and there are plenty of them here in the UK) who refuse to have their kids vaccinated. These parents are cheats. They leach off the protection gained by their children's cohort being immunized, without taking the tiny risk for their own children that the rest of the community is willing to accept. I'm not saying they should be forced to immunize their children, though in the US several states will not allow children to attend school unless they have been. Perhaps we should do the same thing here. If not, they could be named and shamed. They deserve it.