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@BowsacNoodle @Zardoz @Shadowman311 The poliovirus, having a hard crunchy protein shell on the outside instead of being an enveloped virus (outside is fragile cell membrane stolen from the host cell, with proteins sticking out), does survive in water for extended periods of time, per a Brave AI search 75 or more, but declining rapidly by the end of that period.

So not forever, water is kinda hostile in various ways (extremely hostile if it's totally pure, will grab atoms from most anything it's stored in, this is a real problem for certain scientists). And drinking water is treated with chlorine or chlorine compounds, which keep killing all the way to the faucet, important for suppressing cholera.

While the story was suppressed or is strongly denied for the obvious reasons, the Greens convinced Peru to stop chlorinating the water in Lima (the Greens actually want to completely outlaw that vital atom (really)), and that gave them a cholera epidemic in 1991....

Bacteria vs. virus, but chlorine is mighty effective. Still need to add UV to get Giardia which is a protozoa and thus much more sophisticated than a bacteria.

So I submit that if we don't see any polio cases for a decade in the whole world, we'll be able to stop vaccination like we did for smallpox and rinderpest. If we can fucking do the latter even in Darkest Africa, which has a zillion alleles (genes) for lactose tolerance vs. one for the rest of the world....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest