Stuff You Should Know - How We Almost Got Rid of Polio

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

For more than half of the 20th century parents in the industrialized world were freaked out by an unseen waster of youth, the poliovirus. It spread easily and could paralyze children for life or even kill them. Its effects were so horrible that humanity set about ridding if from the Earth. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, you may not know this yet, and if you don't prepare to be blown away, we are creating right now the first ever Stuff You Should Know book. It's called Stuff You Should Know,

colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things, and you can pre-order it now. That's right, and if you pre-order everyone, there's an incentive because you get a free gift, and don't worry if you've already pre-ordered, because you can just head on over to StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com. It's a very beautiful little webpage,

and it's got all the information, and if you've already pre-ordered, can't you just like upload your receipt and get that pre-order gift? Yep, you can, and they will mail it off to you, and you will get it in the mail and you say, oh, thank you, don't mind if I do. And it's a poster that you will love and cherish

and possibly pass on down to your children as an heirloom. That's right, everyone. We couldn't be more excited about this book. It's really coming together well. It's us through and through, and you can go check out some excerpts at StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,

a production of iHeartRadios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know, Polio Cast. That's right, before we get going though, we want to tell everyone that we have a book coming out called Stuff You Should Know,

colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things that you can buy and pre-order online, and pre-orders are very, it's a very big deal to pre-order the book. I never knew what a big deal it was, but pre-orders are very important for the author. Are they, I didn't realize it was a big deal. Now I'm kind of worried.

Now they're a big deal. Okay, well yeah, and guess if everybody will go, you won't regret pre-ordering the book, how about that? And why, because you get a special gift? Not only that, you get a special gift for sure. You just go upload your receipt at StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com, but also the book itself is really great too.

I think you're gonna like it. 26 full, robust chapters that are gonna just knock your socks off, and it's 100% Stuff You Should Know, we. That's right, and we got great illustrations by Carly Monardo. We had a great writer working with us, named Nils Parker, and a great publisher in Flatiron,

and we're just super excited about it, and we appreciate your support. Yep, so you can go pre-order that book everywhere, okay. Wow, Chuck, we're getting really good at that. Now let's talk polio, but we're not good at this, it's transitioning. No, we never have been. So polio, when I was researching this,

I kept running across, whenever I typed in polio, you know, that auto suggests in the search bar, it would say things like, does polio still exist? And it absolutely does, but it's one of those diseases that we're really, really close to eradicating, thanks to an extraordinarily robust vaccination campaign. One of the first really big vaccination campaigns in the history of the world,

and it was also one of the most successful too, so much so that we're down to just three countries, I believe Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are the only three countries where polio is still endemic, where you can just walk around and catch polio, and there are outbreaks in other countries, and we'll talk about it exactly why, but it went from this global worldwide problem

at the beginning of the 20th century, down to three countries, and we're like that close to getting rid of it forever from the planet, basically. Yeah, so, and it's interesting to read about polio, and it's vaccine during the middle of our own pandemic with coronavirus and COVID-19, because there's a lot of similarities and overlap, it's interesting.

There's a pandemic on? Yeah, that's why I haven't seen you in three months. I know, are you getting used to it yet? I mean, sure, just as anyone gets used to something that stinks. Oh, thank you. I didn't mean not seeing you, I mean everything, but sure, that's a part of that.

Oh, okay, gotcha. It's for sure a part of that. But it is weird talking about it for sure, because there are some real similarities for sure. Yeah, so polio is the disease, but polio virus is the entero virus, which is a virus of the intestinal tract, which is an RNA virus like COVID-19,

but the disease itself, like COVID, is the sickness. Polio is the disease as coronavirus is the polio virus. I mixed that all up, but I think it's right. So, coronavirus is to COVID, what polio virus is to polio? Yeah, that's the cleaner way to say it. Right, and then apparently polio specifically, if you say, oh, this person, my grandfather had polio,

you're not talking about just a polio infection, there's a specific kind of disease that you can get from the polio virus where it attacks your central nervous system and can cause all sorts of problems. And that specifically is what somebody's saying when they say they had polio, which is in that case called poliomyelitis,

which is what people are talking about when they say, when they're talking about polio, the disease. Yeah, because a lot of people got the polio virus, didn't know it, had no symptoms, your body kicks into gear, that immune system just fights it off, you got those antibodies for life, and that's it. That happened a lot.

But yeah, like you said, if you get polio, that means that it hitchers your central nervous system, and we'll get more into detail about all this. But polio virus is where it colonizes is in the throat and the digestive system. And we're talking about your feces being contaminated, or infectious and contaminated, and your saliva, depending on how you get it.

So there's basically two ways to pass it along, either with your poop or with your saliva. And the fecal transmission is much more prevalent, especially in the developing world, because of poor sanitation. And like if you look at just the natural history of the virus, of the polio virus, it's ideal is to just replicate, right?

That's the whole purpose of a virus, is just make as many copies of itself as possible. And so living in the water, the drinking water supply, and then infecting people, infecting their gut, replicating, being passed as feces, back into the water supply to infect other people. But without really developing symptoms in people, that's ideal for the virus itself.

Every once in a while though, I think in about one quarter of people who become infected, the polio virus will enter the bloodstream, it'll leave the gut and enter the bloodstream, and will produce what's called viremia, where it infects the blood, it starts to infect other organs, and those people will develop flu-like symptoms

for a couple of days. That's still not that bad, probably nothing we would have mounted a global eradication campaign against. It's just that in a very small proportion of people who become infected, the polio virus not only infects the bloodstream, it actually travels to the central nervous system

and attacks that, and then that is the real problem that comes from polio, what we were talking about earlier, poliomyelitis. Yeah, and no one knows why that happens. No one knows, I mean basically, they just think it's completely random. I mean, that seems to be the case of whether or not you get the paralytic version or not.

It is not many people, but when you spread those numbers out, it can be a lot of people. So when you look at numbers like 0.5% of everyone infected have paralysis, if you look at a human population, that's a lot of people. Right, yeah, just that very small percent of everybody or a ton of people around the world in first centuries

have an infection, it does add up big time for sure. Enough so, and so not just the number also, Chuck, but just the devastating effects that polio can have, poliomyelitis can have on a person. It's a really bad jam because not only can it cause what's called acute flaccid paralysis where your motor neurons or your muscles are attacked so that you can't use your muscle

and your limb starts to wither, maybe you just become fully paralyzed. It can also travel to your brain and affect things like your swallowing reflex or breathing. And so it can very easily kill you when it starts to progress to the central nervous system phase of poliomyelitis. Yeah, and there's no treatment for polio,

and we'll talk about the vaccine here in a minute to a great extent, but it's just like any other virus, you let it run its course, your body will probably do the right thing and step up and fight it back and not let it get to your bloodstream, but like you said, even if it gets to your bloodstream,

you might just get sick, but that 0.5% chance that you actually have the paralytic version, there is no cure for that. No, which was weird. I was like, so you're just a goner if you get poliomyelitis or that's what the case was. And apparently your body can still fight it off. You can get poliomyelitis

and if you receive the proper care, one of the better inventions to combat polio is called the iron lung, which would breathe for you using a bellows and negative and positive pressure to move your chest up and down, like that could keep you alive long enough to give you a chance for your body to fight off the infection

with your immune system, but like that's not a cure, that's just keeping you alive long enough for your body to fight it off. It was really surprising to me that there's still to this day, no treatment for polio. Yeah, I can't help but think of the Big Mabowski when I think of iron lungs.

Who is in an iron lung in that? Remember when they go to visit, they think the kid stole the car or they found the kid's schoolwork in the back of the car and they go to his house and it was this former TV writer who was inside and he's in an iron lung. I genuinely don't remember that part.

I'm sure I'm being shouted at by some of our listeners, but sorry. It was played for laughs. The one I think of is Ralph Maccio in the outsiders after he gets burned from running in that house to save those people. Was he in an iron lung? That's what I thought.

And so I looked it up to verify and there's no mention of it. So I guess when I was a kid, I just made up that Ralph Maccio is in an iron lung in the outsiders. If I'm not mistaken, he was just had a, I guess what you would call a respirator today. Okay, but wasn't he outside down?

Maybe they were called respirators back then. Yeah, I think he was, I think he was face down in traction and suspended and on a respirator, if I'm not mistaken. My tiny little impressionable brain translated that into an iron lung. Yeah, that's okay. Stay gold.

My brain hasn't gotten much better, Chuck. Sure it has. So you can survive, you can fend off a polio infection even with poliomyelitis. But the problem is very frequently would not let you survive. It would kill you.

So like we said, just mounting this campaign became kind of paramount, but polio is tough because they think it's such an old virus. They think it's been around for a very, very long time. And that's kind of evidenced by the fact that polio is, it's only humans that it lives in and tries to replicate. And there's, it's not like other viruses where there's like reservoir animals

that it can hang out in and just basically stay alive until it can infect a human. It's just humans basically. Although there was a case in 1966 of some chimps becoming infected from humans with polio. In that sense. Oh really?

Yeah. Wow. And if we need to, if you need to go over viruses again folks, look no further than the recent stuff you should know classic for March 20th virus talk with Josh and Chuck. That was from March 20th?

The re-release, what do we call those classics? Gotcha. Selects. Specials, selects. Aren't you like one half of this podcast? I am, but I call them classics in my brain. I don't know what the official branding is. Selects.

Yeah. Like we have hand selected this classic episode. Yeah, classics. I think if you, if you scramble the word selects, classics is in there somewhere, but it's misspelled. But yeah, that one just came out recently. So that'll catch up on what a virus is, but should we take a break and talk a little bit

about the ancient history perhaps of polio? Yes. All right. We'll be right back everybody. Wanna learn about a terrasord and call it pterodactyl. How to take a burger and boob and all about fractals. Genghis Khan. A till of the hunt.

The Lizzie Board of Murders and the Cannibal Runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explodes. Chuck. And Josh. This stuff you should know. How do you judge now? Word up Jerry.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with the Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. What?

What? What? What? What? What? What? Well, please. What?

What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What?

What? What? What? What? What? What? old diseases have shoddy record keeping. They just didn't keep up with stuff like they do now.

But we do, you know, if you looked at some of the mummies in ancient Egypt, you might see some limb deformities that could have been polio. There are paintings on walls and things that maybe could be polio, but this is us extrapolating this from a modern lens. Those limbs could have been smashed in a heavy object accident as well.

You never know. A combine accident. Well, I was gonna say that, but they didn't have combines. So a barge accident, how about that? Okay. So like over the years, people were studying polio. And I mean, we kind of started to get a pretty good handle on it.

We didn't understand what viruses were. So we didn't know it was a virus until the 19th or 20th century. No, the 20th century. I think 1908, our old friend Carl Landsteiner who developed blood types was also one of the two people who identified the polio virus in 1908. But other people had contributed up to that point.

Like it was recognized as being an epidemic disease, that there were outbreaks, that kind of stuff. But everybody was kind of okay with polio existing. Like it was not something that we were happy about, but nothing that like there was this great urgency to cure until about the beginning of the 20th century. And they think that people living together close in close quarters, urbanization

and better sanitation led to polio outbreaks that hadn't been seen before because the better sanitation produced a population that had not been exposed to polio virus. Yeah, that seems counterintuitive. It does, but it makes sense because if you've got a virgin population, that thing can just hop from person to person to person.

Whereas if you have an endemic population where any proportion of the population is already immune from having been exposed to the virus before. Cause don't forget, remember, we said a lot of people, most people, I think 75% of people who are infected never even show any signs or symptoms. So if you don't have people like that anymore because of improved sanitation,

but you also don't have a vaccine program, you've got a virgin population that a virus can just run rampant in. And that's what it does. That's what started happening in the early 20th century and it started scaring the bejesus out of parents because it was largely affecting kids. Yeah, and it happened in clusters

because it was so easily transmitted. And like you said, with the virgin population, there would be these big outbreaks and that causes panic with parents especially. Yeah, in 1916 in the US, 6,000 people died from polio in about 27,000 paralytic cases. 1952, 21,000 paralytic cases.

And also Chuck, we said in our book, you remember, in the Mr. Potato Head chapter, that polio outbreak is what made Mr. Potato Head one of the big, the first big toys because so many kids were stuck at home that summer because of a polio outbreak. That's right, and that's exactly what happened because kind of mirroring what we're seeing now

is they would shut down parks and swimming pools and schools and public events. And America rallied behind it back then and said, yeah, that's what we should do for the good of the public. It's not happening now, unfortunately, but back then everyone got on board between I think a quarter of a million

and 650,000 Americans were alive at any given time in the 20th century that had lifelong issues caused by polio. Right, that's a lot of people. I mean, that's a real problem, you know? That's not over the 20th century. That's at any given point in the 20th century, right? Yeah, at any given point.

So you can kind of understand why around then, especially when people were seeing entire classrooms of children struck down with polio, some of whom went on to have lifelong mobility issues, some of whom died, that scared parents a lot, and it scared everybody so much so that it kind of laid the groundwork for this big national and actually an international

push toward coming up with, if not a treatment, which they tried at first and found that was not happening, then a vaccine for polio, and that's exactly what we did. We be humans. Yeah, and a big driver for this vaccine was a little organization called the March of Dimes, which was originally founded in 1938 by Franklin Roosevelt.

It was called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and I never knew this, but they had a march and people would send dimes as donations to the organization, and that's why it's called the March of Dimes. Right. It's amazing. And because of that, because of all those individuals

sending in dimes to the March of Dimes or to the Infantile Paralysis Foundation, that laid the groundwork for the financial support for all of this research that was going on, specifically for the research of one of the guys who came up with a vaccine for polio, because we actually have more than one, but the most famous of them all was Jonas Salk,

who came into the picture in about 1947, and because of those dimes that were contributed by average everyday people, because that money directly funded his research, he very famously refused to patent the vaccine that he came up with for polio and just said, this belongs to the world. Yeah, just like a farmer bro.

Same. Exactly. Same morals, right? Right. So this is a good chance. I'm glad when we get to do shows like this because Jonas Salk gets so much credit and deservedly so as a genuinely great human that walked the planet,

but a lot of people had chipped in over the years to get this vaccine where it was, and we get a chance to talk about those people now, which is always fun. In the 1940s, late 1940s, John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins. All three serial killers.

That's right. They figured out how to grow the polio virus culture in a lab, which if you want a vaccine, that's the first big step is to grow that culture in a lab, and they won in 1954 for those efforts. They won the Nobel Prize in medicine, which is great. Yeah, it was. So that was a huge first step like you were saying.

The people had tried to create a vaccine even before that first step though, I guess the old fashioned way. Brody and Colmer, John Colmer, I don't know Brody's first name, but when they were working together, they created a vaccine that actually killed five of their 10,000 test subjects,

which was not, it wasn't good, and it actually kind of set the whole vaccine movement back a hint, but astoundingly, it didn't kill it. And rather than saying like, no, we're not going to try this, people looked at polio cases and said, this is so bad, we need to keep pushing forward despite that.

And so by the time salt came along and started working on his vaccine, you know, people were already a little jumpy about the idea, and it was made all the more so that he was trying an unproven form of vaccine, whereas most vaccines used attenuated virus, which is it's live, but it's a weakened version of the virus,

and it's in a much smaller dose. What Salk was suggesting, what he wanted to use was an inactivated virus, which it's dead in the sense that it can't replicate any longer, it's been treated with formaldehyde, but it's a huge dose of it. So if it's not dead, you're in big trouble.

Yeah, and it was a big deal at the time because it was a new science, and a lot of scientists said that I don't think you could administer this much, even killed a virus safely. And so what you had was a couple of different things going on, a couple of potential pathways to take was give a little bit of that weakened virus

that's still alive to kids, which we know is gonna infect them with a virus, so it's gonna generate those antibodies, but hopefully it's not gonna be strong enough to get to that central nervous system point of infection, or super dose them with this inactive virus, and that's gonna cause antibodies in the blood, so that will 100% prevent polio from happening.

That will keep it from going to the central nervous system. They knew that, and that's great news, but boy, you better be sure that that virus is perfect, because if it's not, then you're in big trouble. Right, and not only that, that's a big risk with it, but if you do it right, the risk goes very close to zero. The other problem with it is because it produces antibodies in the bloodstream, that leaves out the gut,

which means that you could still be infected by polio, and colonize your gut and replicate and be passed in your feces, but because you have those antibodies in your bloodstream, it's going to protect you from ever developing poliomyelitis. Yeah, they were trying to stop the disease, not stop the virus.

Right, well, it depends on the paradigm, like the one that actually infects you with polio is going to prevent any polio virus from ever colonizing your gut ever again. So it depends on which approach you're coming from, and over the course of a couple of decades, both came into use enough around the world that we actually have come close to eradicating polio,

thanks to this combination of both of them. Yeah, so Salk developed a two-part test that he used on himself and volunteers, and then in 1954, you had to, you know, this was, you had to get a massive PR campaign behind this, like in a big way, because they had to vaccinate a million children. They were called the polio pioneers,

and even though it was, even though it looked good, it's still a big deal to vaccinate a million kids with this new vaccine that you're not quite sure about yet, but they figured just, that was their only choice. They were like, we can't just let polio continue to thrive and paralyze and kill our children. We have to take a chance with these pioneers. Right, so during this polio pioneer experiment,

it was actually from what I saw the first double blind in a major public health study. So no one knew whether they were getting the placebo or not, or getting the vaccine. But one segment of this group of polio pioneers, 200,000 of them were given a vaccine that wasn't inactivated. So it was a huge dose of still alive polio vaccine.

And 40,000 of those 200,000 people came down with polio. 200 of them were kids who developed paralysis and 10 died. And this was huge, huge. Like, can you imagine a setback like that? Where 200,000 kids were given a vaccine that hadn't been done properly. Like that would just stop it in its tracks now. But again, because polio was so bad,

America at the time was feeling very utilitarian and said, 200 kids developing paralysis is horrible. But without this vaccine, in 1952, 27,000 had developed paralysis. So again, they still push forward, even with the government temporarily suspending vaccination programs, or this test, I believe, American parents still move forward

and vaccinated their kids anyway with this Salk. What came to be known, the IPV or inactive polio virus that Salk developed. That's right, the inactivated polio virus vaccine, which is still around today. And again, doesn't prevent the infection, but it does prevent the bloodstream from moving it on to the central nervous system.

Right, which is, that's polio myelitis. That's again, what people mean when they say polio. That's right. Should we take another break and talk about the other vaccine? Yes. All right, we'll be right back to talk about the cheaper vaccine right after this.

Wanna learn about a terra sore and colostaridactyl? How to take a perfect boob and all about fractals? Can't get scone. Until the hunt. The Lizzie Board of Murders and the Cannibal Runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explode. Just chuck.

And chuck. This is something you should know. Word up, Jerry. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, so there's another guy who is somewhat famous, but not nearly as famous as Jonas Salk. Salk, he announced his findings on CBS radio and became like a household name overnight. I think America was kind of smitten with him because he had tested the vaccine on himself, his wife, his three sons, sterilizing his syringes in his own kitchen.

And he was very much derided by his main rival, a guy named Albert Sabin, or Sabin. I'm not sure which way you pronounce it. I don't think it matters at this point. Sabin? Ooh, that's a good one. Let's go with Sabin. So Albert Sabin, he came up with what we were talking

about the other kind of vaccine, an attenuated virus that had a lot of advantages over Salk's virus, or Salk's vaccine. But because Salk had kind of beaten him to the punch in America, Sabin was forced to kind of go outside of the United States to test his vaccine. And he ended up testing his in the USSR, I believe. Yeah, and like you said, his was attenuated,

so it was live. And it was actually a really infectious strain, but something about this strain, it just seemed to not go to that central nervous system and infect the central nervous system nearly as much. So he went to the Soviet Union, tested more than 10 million people there in the 1950s, and they said, whatever Russian is for thumbs up,

way to go. Gratsky. Great job, Gratsky. And it was widely used and came into the US in the 1960s. So then all of a sudden we have two vaccines. We got the IPV that you have to inject. At first, they thought it had to be boosted every few years, but it was, in fact, a forever injection.

The best kind. Right. It was very safe. There were no systemic reactions. The cost was high, which was kind of a problem at the time, as opposed to the lower cost of the OPV, which was oral, and you gave it on sugar cubes. Right, so there's a lot of advantages with this OPV

over the IPV, and as a result, between the advantages, I mean, just lower cost alone would make public health officials be like, we should go with that. But that whole, the cutter incident where 200,000 kids were accidentally given active polio, that really kind of shook people in Salk's vaccine enough that his vaccine got supplanted by Sabine's OPV, the oral polio virus vaccine, and that became the standard

in the United States from about the early 60s up to, I guess, 2000, basically, right? Yeah, and I think we failed to mention there were three types, three serotypes, type one, type two, and type three, and the OPV, you could get all three of those types onto that one sugar cube, which is great. And if you're infected by one of those serotypes,

it doesn't give you antibodies against the other two, and a vaccine for one doesn't protect against the other two. So you have to get inoculated against all three. And Sabine, remember, he found a strain of polio virus that was very infectious, but didn't attack the central nervous system very, very much. And he actually identified strains for each one of those types that kind of fell into that category.

But the thing is this, remember we said that with an activated or an attenuated live virus, you are actually being given polio virus and you are being infected with polio virus. And so that means that you can actually, you are shedding polio virus in your feces. So let's say you wanna start a vaccination campaign in an area that has poor sanitation

and a lot of resistance to a vaccine campaign. Well, if you can just get in there and vaccinate a few people, they're going to go and shed that polio virus in their feces. And because it's this weakened strain, that weakened strain will go on and infect other people in the community who drink this tain of drinking water.

And they will kind of become what's known as passively vaccinated by this. So it was another advantage in developing areas as well. But there were some major problems with this vaccine and still remain today, mainly because this is a live virus that you're being infected with on purpose. Yeah, and because it's live, even though it's weak,

very, and I don't know about the word rare, but in very few cases, and they think immunodeficiency had a lot to do with it, you could contract polio, you could get the paralysis and you could possibly die. That was known as VAP, Vaccine Associated Paralytic Polio Myelitis. And that's no good, even if there are very few cases,

that's not great for your PR campaign. But not only that, because it was a live virus that could still replicate, they also found that when it entered your gut and colonized there, sometimes it could undergo a type of mutation so that what came out the other end in your feces was actually basically a new version

of the strain that you had been given. And sometimes it was way more infectious, sometimes it was way more deadly, and that would be what you pooped out into the local water supply. And at first, again, compared to like the wild strains of the three types of polio virus that were out there in the world,

at first like it didn't matter. Like that happened infrequently enough that just keep going with this oral vaccine because it's really, really working. But as it became more and more effective and fewer and fewer people had polio, the idea that you were giving them a vaccine that could actually produce a virulent strain

became a real problem. And as a result, people said, well, wait a minute, we need to figure out what to do about this vaccine because we really need to start figuring out how to phase this out. That's right. And is this where the Dutch entered the picture? I believe so.

Yeah, and you might think, what do they have to do with it? They were studying SOC's IPV this whole time. They were using it, they were researching it, they were funded by their own government to do so. And they made it more robust basically against all three types, which is great. And the big thing they did though

is they found out how to reduce the cost because the cost was one of the big drawbacks of SOC's version. And one of the big parts of the cost, very sadly is, is they had to import 5,000 rhesus monkeys every year in the Netherlands alone. 5,000 monkeys in just the Netherlands. So in the 70s, these two people named Paul van Hemert

and Anton van Viesel, they figured out how to grow cultured monkey kidney cells, which is a great record title, I think. Oh, I think so too, I hadn't thought about that. I don't know the band. The band is the plastic beads. Okay. And their new album, cultured monkey kidney cell.

So they figured out how to grow these on plastic beads and steel flasks and then grow that polio virus on the kidney cells. So all of a sudden, you didn't need 5,000 rhesus monkeys, you just needed a few of them and you didn't have to spend, A, you didn't have to kill all those monkeys, which is awesome.

And B, you didn't have to import all those monkeys in that expense and that saved a ton of money and they could all of a sudden pump out these IPV shots at a really reduced rate. All right, so now all of a sudden, Salk's original or actually new improved version of Salk's original vaccine is competitive to the OPV price-wise. I think it's still way more expensive,

but much less way more expensive than it was before. But then also like it prevents poliomyelitis from happening. So what public health officials started to realize, by the way, the US started to switch back to the Salk vaccine, the IPV in 2000. And what public health officials realized is that this combination of the two could actually wipe polio out of existence.

For one, you could prevent poliomyelitis from ever happening in your population with the IPV. But then also, if you could knock out polio in the wild with the OPV and keep the population that you're inoculating from developing these vaccine-associated viruses, right? The mutated viruses that can come out the other end, you could actually wipe polio out of the wild.

As a matter of fact, one type of polio, I believe it was type two, was eradicated. They figured out sometime around 1999. And then I believe in 2015, they officially declared type two polio virus eradicated. It's just gone, that it's just not in the wild anymore because it died out because it couldn't find a host to transmit and replicate.

And we killed it, we got rid of it. From poop though. That's right. Like that's literally in 1999, the last polio dump happened. Yeah, it is kind of crazy because you do, at least in the United States, you associate polio with like the early 20th century, you know? Yeah, so the last polio poop came out,

didn't hook up with anyone that didn't have immunity. And the good news about type two going away was remember how we were talking about the VAP, the VAPP situation with the OPV, it's confusing. Type two was the part most likely to cause that vaccine infection, that vaccine derived infection. So with that out of the way, you were just left with the OPV for types one and three,

which is way more safe and effective. Right, and I saw that type three had actually been declared eradicated as well. I think that it's made some sort of weird comeback in Nigeria, but that I believe it was declared eradicated in 2019. I'm not sure if they double back on that or not. But either way, there does seem to be this idea that we could, and we're right there,

on the cusp of being able to eradicate polio. And there's a difference between eradicate and eliminate. Eradicate is whether zero cases to where the only polio that exists is like in a lab or in vaccinated form. Eliminate is where it just doesn't exist on earth anymore. And for all we know, type two polio virus has been eliminated, but type three and type one, right,

has been close to being eradicated. For example, for all types of polio, in 1988, not very long ago, in 1988 there were 350,000 cases worldwide still. So there's still a lot of polio. In 2017, it was down to 22, 22 worldwide. So we're making like great headway. But unfortunately, the CIA seems to have really gotten

in the way and set polio eradication back by decades from what I've read. Oh yeah? Yes, did you see that scientific American article I sent? I didn't get to that. Okay. Tell us about it. So when the US was hunting for Osama bin Laden, one of the ways that they tried to find them

was through a fake vaccination campaign. And it wasn't for polio, it was for hepatitis C, but they basically got a public health official to mount a fake vaccination campaign to gain entry to the bin Laden compound or suspected bin Laden compound and basically take DNA samples of the children there while they were vaccinating them.

And they, I guess they didn't happen. It wasn't successful. I don't remember how they found out he was in there or not. But the fact that the word got out that this fake vaccination campaign had been used as a ruse by the CIA completely undermined all other vaccination campaigns around the world in places that were already wary

of the CIA, because remember polio is endemic in three places, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And none of those three places really have a great impression of the CIA. So legitimate public health vaccination campaigns in those countries were totally delegitimized in the eyes of local population and the local governments. And in fact, some vaccination workers were murdered

and kicked out of countries directly because of that ruse that the CIA had undertaken. And from what I read, they say that it set this eradication campaign for polio back literally decades because it is built around public trust that these scientists who are injecting them with stuff, these American scientists are trustworthy and that trust has been lost, sadly.

Wow. In that nuts that that can have that kind of ripple effects like that. And now we're gonna have to live with polio at least another 20 years probably. Sad. It is sad. It's polio sad. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

Well, that's it for polio, everybody. Soon that's it for polio. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail, I think, right? Yeah, I'm gonna call this, oh, just correcting us on some stuff. How about that? Okay.

Sorry guys, I'm a bit behind. So this is somewhat old news, but since it involves the Byzantine empire, perhaps old is relative. And the stuff you should know episode how flamethrowers work, Josh says in reference to the Greek fire, something like the Byzantines who we know as Turks

were most notorious for using this stuff. I didn't see that. He said you said it at 531. That sounds made up, that's a made up time state. The Byzantines were not Turks in the sense that white Africaners in South Africa are not Zulus. The Byzantines were Greek speaking colonists

from the Roman empire. The capital of the Roman empire was moved to Byzantium in 330 AD by Constantine the Great. And the strategic port was duly christened and Christianized for a while, at least as Constantinople. Yeah, not Istanbul. The Byzantines were, much as the Africaners

were with the Zulus at odds with the indigenous Turks for most of their history until they were overthrown by the latter in the mid 15th century. The name Constantinople was changed officially to Istanbul in 1930, but had been in use by the non-Greek-speaking natives there for centuries even before the city

fell to the Turks in 1453. Why the heirs of the Roman empire spoke Greek rather than Latin. It's similar to why modern South Africans speak English mostly rather than African. It's probably a couple of whole shows you could do about the convoluted colonial histories touched on above. And that is from Conrad Berube.

Thanks Conrad, I appreciate it. I still dispute that I said anything as ridiculous as what you say I said, but regardless, I'm glad it resulted in that top notch email. If you want to be like Conrad and send us a top notch email, you can do that. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production

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