With wild polio cases at record lows, 2017 was the first year where more cases of cVDPV were recorded than the wild poliovirus, a trend that is expected to continue.To combat this, the WHO in 2016, decided to switch from the trivalent polio vaccine to the bivalent polio vaccine. This vaccine no longer contains the type 2 polio virus because it was eradicated in 1999. Contamination concerns
In 1960, the rhesus monkey kidney cells used to prepare the poliovirus vaccines were determined to be infected with the simian virus-40 (SV40), which was also discovered in 1960 and is a naturally occurring virus that infects monkeys. In 1961, SV40 was found to cause tumors in rodents. More recently, the virus was found in certain forms of cancer in humans, for instance brain and bone tumors, pleural and peritoneal mesothelioma, and some types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. However, SV40 has not been determined to cause these cancers.SV40 was found to be present in stocks of the injected form of the IPV in use between 1955 and 1963. It is not found in the OPV form. Over 98 million Americans received one or more doses of polio vaccine between 1955 and 1963 when a proportion of vaccine was contaminated with SV40; an estimated 10–30 million Americans may have received a dose of vaccine contaminated with SV40.
1950–1955
During the early 1950s, polio rates in the U.S. were above 25,000 annually; in 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 a year, with deaths in those years numbering 3,200 and 1,400. Amid this U.S. polio epidemic, millions of dollars were invested in finding and marketing a polio vaccine by commercial interests, including Lederle Laboratories in New York under the direction of H. R. Cox. Also working at Lederle was Polish-born virologist and immunologist Hilary Koprowski of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, who tested the first successful polio vaccine, in 1950. His vaccine, however, being a live attenuated virus taken orally, was still in the research stage and would not be ready for use until five years after Jonas Salks polio vaccine (a dead-virus injectable vaccine) had reached the market. Koprowskis attenuated vaccine was prepared by successive passages through the brains of Swiss albino mice. By the seventh passage, the vaccine strains could no longer infect nervous tissue or cause paralysis. After one to three further passages on rats, the vaccine was deemed safe for human use. On 27 February 1950, Koprowskis live, attenuated vaccine was tested for the first time on an 8-year-old boy living at Letchworth Village, an institution for physically and mentally disabled people located in New York. After the child had no side effects, Koprowski enlarged his experiment to include 19 other children.