After a man in Rockland County, New York, became the first patient to contract polio in the United States in nearly a decade, experts such as Dr. Peter Salk—whose late father, Jonas, developed a vaccine for the disease—said ...
Jul 25, 2022
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The fear and uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic may feel new to many of us. But it is strangely familiar to those who lived through the polio epidemic of the last century.
Mar 26, 2020
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As scientists around the world rush to find a vaccine to stem the spread of COVID-19, another deadly disease, polio, has become the latest target of misinformation campaigns online.
Sep 19, 2020
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The World Health Organization says a new polio outbreak in Sudan is linked to an ongoing vaccine-sparked epidemic in Chad—a week after the U.N. health agency declared the African continent free of the wild polio virus.
Sep 2, 2020
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In a Perspective piece published in the journal Science, a small international team of researchers is suggesting that the oral polio vaccine be tested to see if it might protect people from infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. ...
A team of researchers from the U.K., Switzerland, the U.S., and the Congo has found that there is an urgent need to combat a vaccine-derived poliovirus. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes ...
They're considered one of mankind's greatest medical achievements, yet people have balked at vaccines almost since the time of the first vaccination—in 1796, when an English country doctor named Edward Jenner inoculated ...
Feb 14, 2015
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Re-introducing a type of polio vaccine that fell out of favour in the 1960s could hasten eradication of the disease, according to new research.
Jul 10, 2014
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For much of the 20th century, summer was considered "polio season," and people were accustomed to seeing swimming pools and movie theaters closed to stave off the latest epidemic. Shaking hands was off limits, and even touching ...
May 13, 2020
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A six-year-old Tennessee boy. Three children in Pittsburgh. Ten people from northern Illinois, all under 18.
Oct 19, 2018
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Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route. The term derives from the Greek poliós (πολιός), meaning "grey", myelós (µυελός), referring to the "spinal cord", and the suffix -itis, which denotes inflammation.
Although approximately 90% of polio infections cause no symptoms at all, affected individuals can exhibit a range of symptoms if the virus enters the blood stream. In about 1% of cases the virus enters the central nervous system, preferentially infecting and destroying motor neurons, leading to muscle weakness and acute flaccid paralysis. Different types of paralysis may occur, depending on the nerves involved. Spinal polio is the most common form, characterized by asymmetric paralysis that most often involves the legs. Bulbar polio leads to weakness of muscles innervated by cranial nerves. Bulbospinal polio is a combination of bulbar and spinal paralysis.
Poliomyelitis was first recognized as a distinct condition by Jakob Heine in 1840. Its causative agent, poliovirus, was identified in 1908 by Karl Landsteiner. Although major polio epidemics were unknown before the late 19th century, polio was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century. Polio epidemics have crippled thousands of people, mostly young children; the disease has caused paralysis and death for much of human history. Polio had existed for thousands of years quietly as an endemic pathogen until the 1880s, when major epidemics began to occur in Europe; soon after, widespread epidemics appeared in the United States.
By 1910, much of the world experienced a dramatic increase in polio cases and frequent epidemics became regular events, primarily in cities during the summer months. These epidemics—which left thousands of children and adults paralyzed—provided the impetus for a "Great Race" towards the development of a vaccine. Developed in the 1950s, polio vaccines are credited with reducing the global number of polio cases per year from many hundreds of thousands to around a thousand. Enhanced vaccination efforts led by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and Rotary International could result in global eradication of the disease.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
