UK-with-kids wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 5:46 am
I don't think the disease will be eradicated any time soon. For one thing, only one disease has ever been eliminated by a vaccine - that was smallpox and it took 200 years. You have to ask why we would prioritise eradicating this particular disease when there are still worse killers out there like malaria and even polio which is still hanging on in central Asia.
Sure, okay. And I can answer that ...
The reason malaria has not been eliminated is that there is an animal reservoir (mosquitoes) and the efficacy of the current best malaria vaccine is too low (about 30%). To eliminate it, one would therefore have to eliminate all the mosquitoes (the vector) because vaccinating everybody won't cut it. Various strategies have been pursued to various effects. Screened windows and draining swamps (malaria used to be endemic in the US but is no more). Spraying with DDT which kinda backfired. And inserting sterile mosquito males into the population. The US has a program at the southern border too. Anyhoo, this basically hinges on eliminating mosquitoes or finding a vaccine with a higher efficacy which because of the non-human reservoir would need to be 99%+ so that the distance between non-infected humans is >> than the maximum flight path of mosquitoes. Note that there are several different malaria strains which complicates things. The disease is evolving.
The only reservoir for polio, on the other hand, is humans, so it's similar to smallpox and is being eradicated with the same methods. Contact tracing patient zero(*) and then isolating and vaccinating everybody around them---much like on those exciting movies. We could have handled COVID in the same way initially if testing had been sufficient and dawdling hadn't been endemic. Anyway, there are just a few hundred/thousand cases of polio concentrating in just a few countries in the world at this stage. It's almost gone.
(Measles is human-only similar to polio and it was almost stamped out by a rather effective (95%+) vaccine until anti-vaxxing allowed a resurgence. OTOH, influenza has animal reservoirs (both pigs and birds) so it will never go away. Ditto Ebola.)
(*) This is why the reservoir is important. You can contact trace a human. Tracing which particular mosquito infected someone is a lot harder
But in short, there are programs for practically all infectious diseases out there. But since the diseases are different, the strategies and success rates are also different.