Today, I received a call from the Department of Human Services to inform me that one of the people who was on the plane that I caught back from Bangkok, has been diagnosed with polio (see article from today's Herald Sun). As a result, they have asked me to go along tomorrow and have an anti-polio jab.

When I was booking the trip, I am fairly sure that nobody mentioned that I'd need a jab for Polio (nor the Bubonic Plague nor the Black Death).

Maybe this is part of the trend for all things retro - old fashions, music and furniture are now popular, so maybe some old diseases feel left out.

It probably won't be long before people wear their sores with pride. Never mind celebrities recovering from addictions - the interesting headlines will be about "Britney and her recovery from Scurvy". Friends can report how they were at parties and saw her refuse fruit that was offered her and suspected that she had a problem - "it was just a matter of time before it got the better of her" a friend told our reporter today.

Anyway, I'll go and have my jab despite the fact that I hate injections - it is probably worth one jab as opposed to getting the disease itself.

For those who are interested, this is what Polio is: :

Poliomyelitis (often called polio or infantile paralysis), is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person-to-person, primarily via the fecal-oral route. The majority of polio infections are asymptomatic. In about 1% of cases the virus enters the central nervous system (CNS) via the blood stream. Within the CNS, poliovirus preferentially infects and destroys motor neurons. The destruction of motor neurons causes muscle weakness and acute flaccid paralysis.

This ancient disease was first recognized as a distinct condition by Jakob Heine in 1840. In the early part of the twentieth century much of the world experienced a huge increase in the number of polio cases. The disease tended to strike white, affluent individuals without warning - it was impossible to tell who would get the disease and who would be spared. These epidemics left thousands of children and adults paralyzed and initiated a rush towards the development of a vaccine. The polio vaccines, developed in 1955 by Jonas Salk and in 1962 by Albert Sabin, are credited with reducing of the annual number of polio cases from many hundreds of thousands to around a thousand. In recent years enhanced vaccination efforts may soon result in global eradication of the disease.
 
 

I have returned from the jab session and managed to avoid all the cameras and journalists who had been invited along. I have watched the news and have seen the people I was sitting with and not myself, so my avoidance tactics worked. It was very well organised and I stood behind the cameras as the press-relations chap gave his update and call for people to contact them. From what I heard, there were 291 people on the flight of which 120 have been contacted and so far 50 had been immunised. Apparently the chances of having caught it are very, very minimal, but they have told me to look for signs of paralysis, swallowing and breathing problems, meningitis, fever, severe headache, stiff neck, drowsiness and confusion, nausea and vomiting and bright lights hurting my eyes. So I'm ok this far - I've checked the length of my legs and they both seem to be similar.

P.S. My mate Lisa says that she saw me on the ABC news this evening, so maybe I didn't avoid the cameras as well as I thought that I had.