Analytical Essay on Vaccination against Polio in Australia

The claim ‘It is increasingly important that Australia maintains strong quarantined measures to protect its environment’ was made. The claim is saying that if Australia doesn’t keep ontop of the diseases, bugs or plants coming into the country then will the countrys ‘herd immunity’ be affected. Herd immunity is the stop of the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results if a sufficiently high proportion of individuals are immune to the disease, especially through vaccination (Google Dictionary, 2019). It was then thought that if a disease that was eradicated in Australia came back, would there be a breakout. Then several diseases were looked at in detail, such as, Smallpox, Rinderpest, Dracunculiasis and Poliomyelitis (polio). All of the diseases were research and it was found that the disease with the most amount of information was polio. Polio was eradicated by vaccine. Therefore the research question of, ‘If Australia doesn’t enforce vaccinations for polio, will the disease come back?’ was created. The reason why the research question of, ‘If Australia doesn’t enforce vaccinations for polio, will the disease come back?’ was created was to find out what would happen if Australia didn’t inforce that their population was vaccinated what would happen.

The research question created directly relates to the initial claim of, ‘It is increasingly important that Australia maintains strong quarantined measures to protect its environment.’ The question relates to the claim by asking if a disease was to come back would it affect the environment. The question uses the population as the ‘enviroment’ and relates it to herd immunity. The question also asks if Australia needs to inforce the vaccine for polio relating to the part of the claim there it states that it is important that Australia maintains stron quarantined measures.

‘If Australia doesn’t enforce vaccinations for polio, will the disease come back?

Background:

A disease is a disorder of a bodies structure or function (Google Dictionary, 2019). Diseases will produce specific symptoms that will affect certain areas of the body that are in relation to the disease. There are four main types of diseases, infectious diseases, deficiency diseases, hereditary diseases and physiological diseases. (Wikipedia, 2019). Infectious diseases such as, hepatitis C, polio, influenza (A and B), and Dengue fever are diseases that are normally harmless, however, these diseases will do damage to the immue system but in some cases they have been found to be helpful. Infectious diseases can be passed from person to person and in some cases cause death (Christian Nordqvist, 2017).

Diseases occurs when the cells in your body are damaged as a result of infection or if the disease is passed on by contamination. Some diseases will stay dormant in the bodys system for months and sometimes even years, whereas some diseases will have signs and symptoms of an illness appear days or even hours after contamination (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2019).

Polio is a highly contagious viral illness that causes nerve injury sometimes leading to paralysis, difficulty breathing and sometimes death. In the Australia the last wild case of naturally occurring polio was in 1972. Despite a worldwide effort to wipe out polio, poliovirus continues to affect children and adults in parts of Asia and Africa. When traveling to another country there is always at risk of catching polio. Adults who have been vaccinated against polio and are planning to travel to an area where polio is still present they should receive a booster dose of inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) to make sure that they are completely vaccinated against polio. In serious cases polio can cause death, the majority of people who are infected with the virus are not aware they've been infected.

Signs and symptoms, which can last up to 10 days, include:

• Fever
• Sore throat
• Headache
• Vomiting
• Fatigue
• Back pain or stiffness
• Neck pain or stiffness
• Pain or stiffness in the arms or legs
• Muscle weakness or tenderness

The fist major recored out break in Australia in 1937. There was houses filled with sick and dying families. For more than half a century from 1930’s-1950’s Australians were absolutely terrified by the reoccurring cases of polio that could leave its victims paralysed, sometimes permanently. Paralyzed patients bandaged into splints that their families built to move around around filled all the hospital wards. It was estimated that 20,000–40,000 Australians developed paralytic polio between 1930 and 1988.

In 1937 Rebecca Round who lived in the small town of Railton was infected with polio, at the age of 7. Rebecca was hospitalized and put into Thomas's splints. The process sees patients bandaged in at ankles, knees, hips, waist. The upper body and head An upper body are also bandaged down. The headpiece keeps the arm joints in neutral positions and if neck muscles are involved in paralysis, the head is ‘blinkered’. Rebecca spent 3 years in hospital, in her Thomas splints. When she eventually left hospital, Rebecca wore callipers. Calipers are re devices that enable people to walk and thereby remain mobile. (Professor Joan McMeeken, 2019).

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Evidence:

The fist vaccine for polio was developed in 1952, by Jonas Salk. Salk experimented with the vaccine on his family. When Jonas found that the vaccine he had created had kept his family for contracting the illness, he started a trial of more patients in 1954. In 1955 the results from the trail were realised, Salk stated that, “The vaccine was 80-90% effective against paralytic polio”, making the trial successful. By 1995 polio had been eliminated in America and in 1997 the last Australian case of polio was recored, and then in 2000 Australia was declared polio-free. (History of Vaccines, 2019).

Figure 3: a map of the world showing percentage of people vaccinated against polio in 1980.

Figure 4: a map of the world showing the percentage of people vaccinated against polio in 1995.

Figure 5: a map of the world showing the percentage of people vaccinated against polio in 2015.

Polio only has one preventative, an inactivated polio vaccine (called IPV) is given by injection (a “shot”) or an oral polio vaccine (called OPV) is given by drops in the mouth (Fam Physician, 1999). When the vaccine was first put into use, less than half the world's countries were vaccinated for polio (figure 3). As the years went by and the vaccine was becoming more successful and people put their trust in the vaccine as seen in figure 2. By 2015 according to figure 5, approximately 90% of the world is now vaccinated against polio.

Although Australia is now polio-free, other countries are not. If foreigners travel to Australia and are infected with the disease there is a high chance that the disease will be passed on to others in Australia. In Australia today 91.15% of children are vaccinated, therefore if someone who is infected with polio comes to Australia and infects a non-vaccinated Australian citizen it could all go wrong.

Polio normally occurs during the tropical rainy seasons, mainly affecting young children. Because there is 8.85% of Australian children are not vaccinated there is a high risk of children being infected. Approximately 2,124,000,000 children are unvaccinated against anything in Australia. Polio thrives in the tropics, in Australia, the tropics are in north Queensland. As of March 2019, there is 5,000,000 people living in Queensland Australia. Come to the conclusion that if the 8.85% of children is spread evenly over the 7 states in Australia it would mean that 1.2% of the 8.85% of the unvaccinated children are from Queensland. Making that 60,000 children from Queensland are unvaccinated (Australian Government of Heath, 2019).

North Queensland is a tourism hot spot for Australia; It is where the great barrier reef is located. Tourists are constantly visiting north Queensland making it extremely easy for a tourist infected with polio to come in contact with one of the 60 thousand children that are unvaccinated. If one of the children that are unvaccinated becomes infected with polio, it will spread very quickly. The 60 thousand unvaccinated children are children that are not vaccinated against anything. That means there is still a fair amount of children that are unvaccinated for polio. This would make it extremely easy for the disease to make its way from far north Queensland all the way down to Victoria.

The initial question of, ‘If Australia doesn’t enforce vaccinations for polio, will the disease come back?’ was further looked at and taken into consideration. If Australia does harden down on people getting vaccinated against polio, the whole of Australia may be at risk again.