History
Polio is an endemic disease earlier known as infantile paralysis. Dr.Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine against
A crippling disease, polio, has been an
- 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.
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- 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.
