I don't know if the friends after 8090 remember that after adults took us to the hospital for injections when we were young, doctors would give a white round "sugar pill", each person was only assigned one, and it was not okay to eat more. What is the role of that round and sweet white "candy"?
In fact, this sugar pill is a "life-saving" sugar pill that saved tens of thousands of lives. It is a vaccine to prevent polio.
Many people may not have a great deal of feeling about polio now, but in the 1950s "polio", commonly known as polio, was a terrible infectious disease.
That's when the polio virus swept through our country, ravaging countless children, including many newborns.
In 1955, a strange symptom that appeared only in children began to spread across the country. Systemic symptoms such as twisting, atrophy, and paralysis of the limbs paralyzed thousands of people and killed more than four hundred people in a matter of months.
What is polio?
It is an acute infectious disease caused by poliovirus infection, which tends to occur in summer and autumn, and can occur in other seasons. More common in children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years, the number of polio patients has decreased by more than 99% since the launch of the global polio eradication campaign.
After the virus enters the human body through the respiratory tract or digestive tract, it first invades the local lymph node tissue in the pharynx and intestinal lumen, and grows and multiplies in it.
If the body's immunity is strong, the virus can be controlled locally; if the virus is too aggressive, the virus will enter the bloodstream and multiply through the blood into other parts of the body, eventually infecting the motor nerve cells in the anterior horn of the spinal cord and causing the disease.
Different types of polio, the symptoms are not the same.
The main clinical manifestations are fever, pharyngitis and limb pain, some infected people will have limb soft paralysis, muscle atrophy, etc., and in severe cases, they may die due to muscle paralysis that assists breathing.
There is currently no specific treatment for polio, which is mainly symptomatic treatment, symptom relief, promotion of recovery, prevention and management of complications, and rehabilitation.
Polio not only affects the normal life of patients, but also causes complications such as pneumonia, atelectasis, acute pulmonary edema, gastrointestinal bleeding, etc. Some patients can also leave paralysis sequelae, commonly known as "polio".
Treatment is symptomatic supportive, disease outcomes are largely related to severity, and patients who do not develop paralysis usually recover well and conversely have a poor prognosis.
Why don't you eat "sugar pills" now?
There are currently two types of polio vaccines, one is the live attenuated polio vaccine , the "Sugar Pill" (OPV) and the other is the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), which is made from inactivated viruses and requires injections.
With the advent of vaccines, the global incidence of polio has decreased considerably year by year. And now people's living standards are getting higher and higher, coupled with the requirements of the World Health Organization, by 2018, all IPV vaccines will be used as scheduled. So Sugar Pill withdrew from the stage of history.