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Commentary

Moving from a Terracentric to a Heliocentric World

By James J. Tuite, III
 

Challenging long-held beliefs is a daunting enterprise, but the effort can literally change the world. Although Copernicus is believed to have developed his revolutionary theory placing the sun, not the earth, at the center of the universe many years before his death, he anticipated the controversy it would evoke and published it from his deathbed. When Galileo sought to prove Copernicus's theory, he was brought before the Inquisition and threatened with torture. A heliocentric world raised too many uncomfortable questions. It rattled the status quo. But the discovery of a new tool, in this case the telescope, shed light on the problem and forever changed the way we view our place in the universe. So it is, perhaps, with the puzzle laid out in the following article, "Will the Poliovirus Eradication Program Rid the World of Childhood Paralysis?"
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To be clear, the campaign to rid the world of poliovirus waged by the March of Dimes and the World Health Organization has been both worthy and very nearly triumphant. Countless lives have been spared, and nothing can undermine that accomplishment. But though the world may be nearly scoured of poliovirus, it is not free from troubling increases in acute flaccid paralysis. The poliovirus as a causative agent of acute flaccid paralysis may be on the wane, but the threat of unexplained paralysis is not.

In this deliberately provocative article, the author points out a fundamental problem in the equation of "immunization = eradication of poliomyelitis." That problem, the author suggests, may lie in the state of science at the time that the poliovirus immunization programs were created. The science and technology of immunization development was still in its infancy. The methodologies employed a half-century ago to isolate infectious material would be scoffed at today. Yet it appears that today's knowledge and technology have not been applied in a reexamination of the poliovirus and the development of the poliovirus vaccine. Given the importance of the poliomyelitis eradication effort, and the tragedy of polio- and nonpolio-paralysis, it is long past time to subject this old disease to new scrutiny.