Stabilising oral poliovaccine at high ambient temperatures

The oral poliovaccine strains lose infectivity when they are stored above refrigerator temperatures. These losses increase rapidly at the high temperatures encountered in tropical countries, thus causing problems if the cold chain is inadequate. Attempts to minimise these losses have generally relied on the addition of salts such as MgCl2. In this paper we show that the fall in infectivity, which is due to the hydrolysis of the genomic RNA by the RNA polymerase within the virus particle, can be greatly inhibited by the suppression of this enzymatic activity. This can be achieved simply by reducing the pH below 7.