Early exposure to virus may save future lives in a way similar to early exposure to peanuts may prevent nut allergy.
"A trial, involving hundreds of babies under a year old at high risk for developing peanut allergy, established that kids could be protected by regularly eating a popular peanut butter-flavored Israeli snack called Bamba. A follow-up study later showed those kids remained allergy-free even after avoiding peanuts for a year.
Did improvements in sanitation doom the kids in the 1950's to the Polio epidemic by preventing early exposure to the virus?
Will this Quarantine likewise doom a future generation to another pandemic?
From:
The man in the iron lung
"When he was six, Paul Alexander contracted polio and was paralyzed for life. Today he is 74, and one of the last people in the world still using an iron lung. But after surviving one deadly outbreak, he did not expect to find himself threatened by another."
Polio existed in isolated outbreaks around the world for millennia, but it didn’t become epidemic until the 20th century – helped, ironically, by improvements in sanitation.
Poliovirus enters the body through the mouth, via food or water, or unwashed hands, contaminated with infected fecal matter. Until the 19th century, almost all children would have come in contact with poliovirus before the age of one, while they still enjoyed protection from maternal antibodies transferred from mother to baby during pregnancy. However, as sanitation improved, children were less likely to come into contact with poliovirus as babies; when they encountered it as older children, their immune systems were unprepared.
There was no way of predicting who would walk away from an infection with a headache, and who would never walk again.
In most cases, the disease had no discernible effect.
Of the 30% or so who showed symptoms, most experienced only minor illness.
But a small proportion, 4-5%, exhibited serious symptoms, including extreme muscular pain, high fever and delirium. As the virus hacked its way through the neural tissue of the spinal cord, a few of those infected were paralyzed.
This progression of the virus was known as paralytic polio. Roughly 5-10% of patients who caught paralytic polio died, although this number was far higher in the days before widespread use of the iron lung.
Edited by Rogerdodger, 27 May 2020 - 10:35 PM.
