Hey, guess what the definition of polio is, according to Pediatric Infectious Diseases, by Hugh Moffet: “nonpurulent meningitis with asymmetric flaccid paralysis”……….. - SM
http://www.redflagsweekly.com/polio.html
Will the Poliovirus
Eradication Program Rid the World of Childhood Paralysis?
With So Little Poliovirus Detected Around the World, What Is Causing
Today’s Outbreaks of Acute Flaccid Paralysis?
By Neenyah Ostrom
Commentary by James J. Tuite, III
April 20, 2001 - The World Health Organization’s massive poliovirus eradication
program recently declared Egypt on the threshold of eradicating poliovirus.
“We are now at the end of a polio era,” a UN Children’s Fund Project Officer
told Reuter’s news service at the end of February 2001, with “not a single case
of the crippling virus reported so far this year” or last (2000) in Egypt. Does
this trend toward eradication of poliovirus mean an end to childhood paralysis
around the world?
There is no obvious answer to that question.
According to another set of statistics compiled by the World Health
Organization (WHO), there were 54 cases of “acute flaccid paralysis”
(abbreviated AFP) in Egypt in 2000, the most recent year for which statistics
are available. In 1999, although 9 AFP cases were classified as due to
poliovirus, Egypt had 276 more AFP cases that were classified as nonpolio
paralysis. These WHO statistics, kept back to 1996 for almost every country
in the world, reveal a surprising fact: Most of the paralysis around the world
today is not caused by the poliovirus.
This fact raises new, disturbing questions, including: Was there ever an epidemic of poliovirus infection in the United States and Canada? These two countries experienced a great number of cases of AFP, to be sure, during which many children (and some adults) tragically were paralyzed or died.
How many of these cases of paralysis, however, were caused by poliovirus? What
did cause those not associated with poliovirus? And what continues to cause so
much misery in areas of the world least-equipped to be able to deal with it?

Will mass vaccination campaigns and poliovirus eradication programs ensure that
no child is ever again paralyzed? Or is it time—using new tools that didn’t
exist in the mid-twentieth century when ground-breaking poliomyelitis research
was first performed—to re-examine that basic research and the assumptions
underlying it?
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Read the article: also read: Read the commentary by
James Tuite: |