Widespread vaccinations efforts have helped to eradicate polio—a potentially debilitating or deadly disease—in the wild across most of the globe.
Health officials say the best way to keep the United States free of polio is to maintain high levels of immunity through vaccination efforts.
In most cases, adults today would likely have been vaccinated against polio as children and, thus, do not need to get the polio vaccine. However, the CDC recommends that certain groups who have never been vaccinated against the disease should consider getting three doses of IPV. These groups include people who are traveling to a country with a higher risk of contracting polio, people who work in labs who may be exposed to samples containing polioviruses and health care workers treating potential polio patients.In the U.S., the use of the OPV vaccine was stopped in 2000, although it is still used in many parts of the world.
The OPV vaccine contains live polio virus, albeit in a weakened form, and is highly effective at protecting against the disease. In fact, OPV tends to be more effective than IPV at mitigating the spread of the disease between people. However, in extremely rare cases, the weakened virus in the OPV vaccine has mutated into a form capable of causing disease. As a result, U.S. health authorities switched to only using the IPV vaccine in 2000, which contains an inactivated form of the poliovirus and, thus, cannot cause disease.
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