The world has been busy with virus and disease outbreaks over the last few years. It’s more than an increase in measles. Hepatitis A has also surged recently, along with yellow fever and various other new illnesses in the country.

Health officials have had a tough task handling these new disease risk. They’ve looked for completely new outlets to improve relief efforts and help those affected by the outbreaks.

Two of the most notable outbreaks in recent years were cholera in Zimbabwe and Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cholera outbreak led to the country’s Ministry of Health declaring a state of emergency. Ebola cases in the DRC seem to grow with every new day. The virus has spiraled so out of control that it became the world’s second largest Ebola outbreak in history.

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Experimental medicine has long been a staple when it comes to treating disease.

A rudimentary smallpox inoculation centuries ago led to the first vaccine, but recently we’ve also seen many new ideas. Odor profiling is now used to find asymptomatic malaria patients and new immunotherapy techniques can expose and eliminate HIV.

But still, these experimental solutions can come from even more surprising sources. Recently, that source is muck from a partially decomposed eggplant. That treatment has already ended up playing a major role in giving life back to one young cystic fibrosis patient in 2017.

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After a century of testing and research, we found a breakthrough with the polio vaccine in 1955. Since that time, the vaccine in some form has been used around the world to greatly reduce polio risk.

The widely-used oral vaccine has been the standard polio immunization in most countries. This immunization benefits from an attenuated form of polio within the vaccine, according to the New Scientist. When the body’s immune system recognizes the virus as an intruder, the immune system is activated and fights against the ingested “illness.”

But, we’ve also learned that polio can change over time.

This live virus is smart and has the ability to mutate, which then causes polio even though the person was vaccinated. According to Medical Express, that can happen for one in 2.7 million cases. They do go on to mention the many benefits of the oral vaccine. “It is cheap to make and easy to administer: people just swallow it.”

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Measles has been at the forefront of the news, from its rapid increase to countries forming new laws and varying opinions about the vaccine. Whether you’re looking on social media or a news site, measles is in the headlines.

Don’t expect that to change soon.

A recent study conducted by Italian scientists predicts that measles will significantly rise by 2050. Published in BMC Medicine, results showed a possible 50% rise in measles cases. Study authors Filippo Trentini, Ph. D and Piero Poletti, Ph. D concluded that some high-income countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, have already met “elimination threshold.”

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In today’s world, the poliovirus circulates in just three countries; Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, plus a risk for the return of polio in Papua New Guinea.

That wasn’t always the case. In the last century alone polio plagued the United States.

But, the entire history of polio dates back long before there was any recorded history. It wasn’t until British physician, Michael Underwood, provided the first clinical description of the disease in 1789 that the world recognized polio as a detrimental problem.

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