Poliomyelitis - History

History

Polio is an endemic disease earlier known as infantile paralysis. Dr.Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine against polio.

A crippling disease, polio, has been an endemic for thousands of years. A brief outline of the milestones of polio over the years has been given below:

• The first clinical description of polio was presented by the British Physician Michael Underwood in 1789. He referred to polio as "debility of the lower extremities."
• Later, during early 1890, the United States documented its first significant outbreak of infantile paralysis, subsequently identified as poliomyelitis.

• In 1908, Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper hypothesized that polio may be caused by a virus.

• The year 1952 recorded a maximum of 58, 000 cases of polio in the United States. This led to the development of the first vaccine against polio by Dr. Jonas Salk.
• The inactivated (killed), injectable polio vaccine (IPV) was deemed safe and effective by Dr. Salk, following which he vaccinated 160 children and adults in Pittsburgh, including his own three children.

• Massive field trials conducted in 1954 brought down the number of polio cases drastically.
• In the meanwhile, Dr. Albert Sabin, in 1961, developed a "live" oral vaccine against polio (OPV). OPV rapidly became the vaccine of choice for most immunization programmes in the world.
• The last case of polio caused by a "wild" virus was reported in the U.S. in 1979.
• The 1980s saw the development of a medical condition called post-polio syndrome.
• In 1981, Vincent Racaniello and David Baltimore at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Eckard Wimmer at State University of New York, Stony Brook, published the sequence of poliovirus genome.
• In 1988, the forty-first World Health Assembly adopted a resolution for the worldwide eradication of polio and Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched
• The 50th anniversary of the announcement of the Salk vaccine was acknowledged on April 12, 2005.