Polio provocation - the health debate that refused to go away

For much of the 20th century, health professionals were locked in debate about one possible cause of paralytic polio. Some argued that the viral infection could be provoked by medical interventions; others hotly contested this theory. Historian Dr Stephen Mawdsley looks at the unfolding story of polio provocation. It is fascinating to look at how polio provocation, which some experts contested simply did not exist, migrated from being a theory to a clinical model - Dr Stephen Mawdsley In 1980, public health researchers working in West Africa detected a startling trend among children diagnosed with paralytic polio. Some of the children had become paralyzed in a limb that had recently been the site of an inoculation against a common paediatric illness, such as diphtheria and whooping cough. Studies emerging from India seemed to corroborate a similar association between diagnosis of polio and recent immunisation. These reports reignited a debate known as the theory of polio provocation that has waxed and waned since the early 1900s - and, at times, shaped immunisation policy.