There are few diseases which prove the effectiveness of vaccines better than the near-eradication of polio from a disease that changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people to one that affects dozens.
Everyone needs to have the polio vaccine and almost everyone will receive it as part of the 6-in-1 vaccine given soon after they are born. They will then often have it as part of a pre-school booster at three years and four months and then again as a teenage booster at 14.
This initiative means that the last case of polio in Europe was in 2003, the last wild case in the United Kingdom was in 1984 and less than 100 cases of polio a year are found in the world.
However, if you are travelling this year, your local travel health clinic may advise that you need a booster vaccination before you can enter certain other countries, because the disease is life-threatening and life-changing enough to make no amount of risk too small.
What Is Polio?
A highly contagious disease without immunisation, poliomyelitis or polio has in many cases no symptoms at all, and even in several cases where people do experience symptoms, they are more indicative of a condition like the flu, with fatigue, fever and muscle soreness being commonplace.
However, polio can cause much more serious, potentially permanent and life-threatening nerve damage which can cause paralysis of various muscles in the body.
This can become life-threatening if polio paralyses the muscles used for breathing. This happens in between two and ten per cent of cases of polio which have paralysis as a symptom (which itself is between 0.1 and 0.5 per cent of all cases), which can also affect the muscles in the legs or arms.
In most cases, people will recover and with the help of physiotherapy restore full movement of
any affected limbs, but in others, it can lead to permanent disability.
The risks of these symptoms are why polio is taken as seriously as it is, despite only dozens of cases being reported worldwide.
When Do You Need A Polio Booster?
Polio is only endemic in two countries in the world according to the World Health Organisation: Afghanistan and Pakistan.
There are fewer than 100 cases in the world, down from over 350,000 in 1988, and its status has changed from being one of the most feared childhood diseases in the world to one that is on the cusp of being wiped out in the same way smallpox was.
However, due to how poliovirus circulates, the requirements for vaccination can vary by country and by itinerary.
If you are planning to travel to a country where polio cases have been found, particularly if you plan on staying for a long time in a location where clean water supplies are not guaranteed, you will likely be advised to take a polio booster vaccine.
In other cases, you may be asked to take a booster vaccine if you have not completed the initial series of childhood polio vaccinations, and in many cases, travel clinics and international borders will err on the side of caution.
This is because the contagious nature of polio means that even a single person could cause a potential outbreak. As the WHO noted, as long as a single person is infected, children around the world are at risk from a potential epidemic.