Scientists develop safer, less costly polio vaccine

As the world nears poliovirus eradication, the vaccines themselves have become the greatest threat. In response to a global demand for an effective, safer-to-handle and less costly polio vaccine, scientists at the Uniformed Services University (USU) have developed a new one that could help secure a polio-free world. In developing countries, the live Sabin oral polio vaccine (OPV) has generally been used because it has been more cost effective than the injectable, inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). Now, both OPV and IPV are becoming tricky because children vaccinated with OPV can shed paralysis-causing mutant polioviruses, and because the manufacture of IPV uses deadly, “wild” viruses that are a biosecurity threat. Therefore, in a call to action, the World Health Organization (WHO) has urged the scientific research community to develop safer polio vaccines, ideally based on the use of inactivated “killed” Sabin viruses since they are much safer to handle than the “wild”...