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Informative Essay On Polio

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When your parents were just little kids their greatest fear wasn’t getting the flu or the stomach bug like kids nowadays; one of their greatest fear was contracting a disease called polio. Poliomyelitis is a disease that infected younger children in the 1900s. Poliomyelitis caused paralysis and sometimes organ failure. So how can this terrible disease be used to help people these days? Glioblastoma, also known as brain cancer has killed many and has no cure. Yet one scientist thought of a crazy idea that just might work; infecting the tumor with polio. Glioblastoma is a cancer that causes tumors to grow in the brain, slowly cutting off the electrical impulses in the brain, thus killing its host. With these types of brain tumor, and their locations in the brain and the fact that they are composed of a variety of different cells that grow very rapidly, makes this type of cancer very difficult to cure. There's no way to cut out the tumor due to how fast it spreads in the brain, and the different types of cells they are composed …show more content…

With new vaccines and defenses, it has not run rampant for over a century in the US. So when a scientist said he wanted to infect a brain tumor with the polio virus, everyone probably thought he was crazy. Why infect people with a disease they fought so hard to get rid of? Scientist’s had to find a way to keep the cancer killing qualities of the polio, but stop the damage causing qualities. Using gene replacement, scientists created a modified the polio virus, PVS-RIPO. They used a gene from the common cold (rhinovirus) to take away the bad paralytic qualities of the polio virus, leaving it with only cancer fighting qualities. Therefor it causes no damage to the subject but destroys the cancer with two armies, the PVS-RIPO and the body’s own immune system. Without the damage-causing part of the polio virus, it has no bad side effects, and became a cure for

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