What's with all this talk about Polio?
Polio is actually the subject of 2 of our articles this week. Huh...
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Malawi is starting a round of polio vaccinations after a 4-year-old was paralyzed by it
The Eastern African nation of Malawi has not seen any polio cases in 30 years. In fact, this is the first case of polio in the entire continent caused by wild polio since Africa was declared free of wild polio in 2020. No contact with Pakistan (the nearest country with wild polio) was identified and so public health officials believe that the girl got polio from someone else in Malawi.
Polio spreads very easily between children leaving most asymptomatic but permanently paralyzing 1 in every 200 or so. This is why tracing it is incredibly challenging and vaccination is the best countermeasure.
Therefore, Malawi and 3 of its neighbors- Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania- are launching a mass vaccination campaign to vaccinate nearly 9.4 million children under 5 years old over the course of 4 days of vaccinations next week. Another neighbor, Zimbabwe will also be joining in later rounds of mass vaccinations in late May or early June, said Modjirom Ndoutabe, who is the polio coordinator in the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Africa.
eCoin Peripheral Neurostimulator, a bladder remote, gets FDA approval
The FDA recently approved the eCoin peripheral neurostimulator which is a device meant to help people who have urgent urinary incontinence or lack of bladder control. The eCoin neurostimulator is like a small coin that is implanted under the skin in the ankle and can stimulate the tibial nerve to control the urinary bladder.
The tibial nerve is actually a big nerve that carries signals for the legs but in this case it is being used to send a signal from the eCoin to the nerves that actually control the bladder. A common challenge many stimulation devices have to overcome is specificity of stimulation. Essentially, they have to make sure that their device will stimulate only the targeted nerves. That is incredibly challenging since it is hard to direct electrical signals with such high precision. Electric discharges aren’t like water from water hoses that can be directed in specific directions. They spread everywhere from the point that they are released.
So, the most common way stimulation devices operate is by stimulating a very prominent nerve since you can make sure that the stimulation goes through and the nerve’s large size makes it an easy target. Most of the time a big nerve close to the target nerve is used. That’s what is happening in this case. The exact pathway of nerves from the tibial nerves to the nerves that control the urinary bladder is not well understood but it is known to be an effective pathway for controlling the bladder using stimulation. The device works by sending a pulse at a time interval set by doctors to modulate the frequency at which the patient needs to urinate.
In its clinical trials, 2/3s of the patients had a greater than 50% reduction in urgency urinary incontinence. Additionally, after approval, the company, Valencia technologies has to monitor patients using this device for an additional 5 years to really make sure that the device has minimal unintended side effects and is effective.
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Other Updates
ARPA-H got its funding approved but has been handed back to the Biden administration so it might not become independent of the NIH after all.
A study trying to characterize workplace violence impacting public health officials since the beginning of the pandemic found:
“At least 1499 harassment experiences were identified by LHD [or local health departments] survey respondents, representing 57% of responding departments. We also identified 222 position departures by public health officials nationally, 36% alongside reports of harassment. Public health officials described experiencing structural and political undermining of their professional duties, marginalization of their expertise, social villainization, and disillusionment. Many affected leaders remain in their positions.”
Featured Fake News
After hearing the discussion about a fourth COVID-19 vaccine shot, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said that she had never heard the CDC say that we should get 4 polio shots.
Now there are a number of reasons why this is not a fair comparison, mainly that the polio vaccine is built around a completely different technology, not the mRNA delivery system. However, the biggest counter argument to this comparison is that the CDC DOES RECOMMEND 4 doses of the Polio vaccine.
“[The] CDC recommends that children get four doses of polio vaccine. They should get one dose at each of the following ages: 2 months old, 4 months old, 6 through 18 months old, and 4 through 6 years old”
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