Polio Eradication

Question

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Answer

My selected population health problem is poliomyelitis, also referred to as polio, a disease that paralyzes children. It has been eliminated in most parts of the world, but it still affects poor people especially in Africa and Asia. Efforts to eradicate the disease have been ongoing since 1988 through the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Rotary International as well U.S Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Bhattacharya &Dasgupta, 2009). The goal was to eradicate polio from the world by the year 2000 (Bhattacharya &Dasgupta, 2009). The eradication of polio has involved immunization and other epidemiological methods that include disease surveillance that are aimed at establishing the numbers of the population that get new infections and disease notification network that would be used to alter the methods of controlling the disease based on its occurrence. Surveillance of polio was meant to indicate and provide measurements of the success rate of various polio eradication techniques (Henderson, 2016). The health agencies investigated how the disease occurs, its treatment methods, as well as the most vulnerable populations.

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            Epidemiological methods used in the eradication of smallpox can be highly useful in the elimination of polio from the face of the world. While the notification system for polio is working, the numbers of notifications that are reported are few due to lack of efficient data collection centers (Bhattacharya &Dasgupta, 2009). Many cases of polio are reported late, often several months after their occurrence. It is, therefore, difficult to keep track of new infections. As a case in point, it should be noted that the eradication of smallpox involved an efficient notification system that resulted in the interruption of transmission (Bhattacharya, 2010). For this reason, smallpox was successfully eliminated. Polio eradication efforts should include efficient notification methods that would help in early intervention in the event of paralysis.

            Addressing the polio menace at the population level is less costly compared to when it is done at the individual level. The population-level approach is preventive and it involves less costly periodic immunization as well as surveillance and notification processes (McCrossan, McCafferty, Murphy & Murphy, 2015). On the other hand, treatment at an individual level will expensive because it will put a strain in the health sector through the need for qualified physicians to treat the patients, bed space in hospitals, and many cases of polio paralysis.

References

Bhattacharya, S. (2010). The art of medicine: Reflections on the eradication of smallpox. The Lancet, 375(9726), 1602.

Bhattacharya, S. &Dasgupta, R. (2009). A tale of two global health programs Smallpox Eradication’s Lessons for the Antipolio Campaign in India. American Journal of Public Health, 99(7), 1176-1184.

Henderson, D. A. (2016). The development of surveillance systems. American Journal of Epidemiology, 12,229-248.

McCrossan, P., McCafferty, C., Murphy, C. &Murphy,J. (2015). Retrospective review of administration of childhoodprimary vaccination schedule in an Irish tertiaryneonatal intensive care unit. Public Health, 129, 896-898.