Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers, and today we have a conversation about polio and polio vaccines.

Dr. Bill Moss, executive director of the Johns

Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center and an expert in vaccines and vaccine preventable

diseases, talks about this incredibly dangerous disease and the vaccines that cannot only prevent it,

but that have actually helped to eradicate it from most of the world. Let's listen.

Dr. Bill Moss, thank you so much for returning to public health on call. Today we're talking about

polio. So can you help us understand just how dangerous polio is? Yes, thank you, Lindsay, and great

to be back. And polio has been in the news a lot recently,

so it's very important that we talk about this. So polio is an infectious disease caused by

polio viruses, and there are three types of polio viruses. And it's an infectious disease

that's transmitted through what we call the fecal or root.

So it goes into the mouth, into the gut, comes out the other end, and that's how it's transmitted

through contaminated water or food or even hands from one person to the next.

Many people who acquire poliovirus infections, particularly early in childhood, will have a relatively

minor illness. Some they'll have a fever. Sometimes it will have a flu-like illness. More seriously,

they'll get what we call an aseptic meningitis, which really just means some inflammation

around the brain, around the meninges, that's not due to

a bacterial infection. But what we really worry about, and it only occurs in about one in a 100,

...