China's Polio Vaccine

[Randy W]

from China Pictorial

 

Gu Fangzhou: Sugarcoating Vaccines

TEXT BY LI ZHUOXI

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

 

http://production.cp.siz.yt/media/1/PRINTED_MAGAZINES/2019%20January/A%20Scientist%E2%80%99s%20Dream/14339188_8.jpg

 

 

The same year, Gu and his research team traveled to the mountainous areas of Yunnan Province in southwestern China to prepare a polio vaccine production base with the goal of developing and producing 4.5 million doses. The production base was situated on Yu’an Mountain in Kunming, which lacked roads, water and electricity at the time. It took only nine months for researchers to build shelters and transport the equipment themselves, and soon a vaccine production base was functioning on the barren hills.

“We had nowhere to live up there,” Gu recalled. “We had to set up our own base and work everything out by ourselves. There wasn’t enough food. It was a very difficult period.”

In early 1960, China successfully developed a polio vaccine.

. . .

At that time, existing polio vaccines developed in the United States and the Soviet Union generally used injectable inactivated vaccines. Experts held different views: Some argued that inactivated vaccines were safer and that attenuated vaccines could recover virulence in feces after leaving the human body; others stressed that the attenuated vaccine could be distributed in the environment after being discharged from the body to become a natural vaccine that helped human form an immunity barrier that inactivated vaccines could not.

As the debate raged on, Gu determined that an inactivated vaccine was not suitable for China’s local conditions. First, inactivated vaccines are costly. Back then, hundreds of millions of children were eagerly awaiting the vaccine, and the government could not afford the costs. Second, injecting children would have required a huge trained epidemic prevention team that China lacked at that time. Above all, although inactivated vaccines can reduce the incidence of the disease, their power to control the epidemic was inadequate. Multiple doses were required, and if antibodies in the blood did not survive long enough, the virus could still cause an epidemic. This situation was confirmed by studies in the United States, Canada and other countries.

 

 

 

 

from Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

 

Two types are used: an inactivated poliovirus given by injection (IPV) and a weakened poliovirus given by mouth (OPV).

. . .

The first polio vaccine was the inactivated polio vaccine. It was developed by Jonas Salk and came into use in 1955. The oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin and came into commercial use in 1961. They are on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. The wholesale cost in the developing world is about US$0.25 per dose for the oral form as of 2014. In the United States, it costs between $25 and $50 for the inactivated form.