dr jonas salk Archives | The Banality Report

Only 33 people contracted Paralytic Poliomyelitis, the deadly and paralysis-causing disease most commonly known as polio last year worldwide. Just 30 years ago there were 350,000 cases of polio in the world, a 99% reduction from 1988 to 2018. This means that today, this week, or this year, you or your child did not contract polio, and you probably didn’t even think about it whereas for people in the 1940’s and ‘50’s it was one of their biggest domestic worries.

In the 1950s, polio was one of the most feared diseases as it swept across the United States and the world from the late 1800s into the first half of the 20^th century. The disease usually targets children under the age of five and often results in debilitating lifelong paralysis, or even death. In fact, 1 in 200 infections lead to lifelong paralysis, and among those infected, 5% to 10% will die as a result. In the 1950s in the United States, the number of polio cases peaked at nearly 60,000, and more than 3,000 people died. Others would become paralyzed for life, some would be forced to use an iron lung in order to keep breathing.*

In 1951, Dr. Jonas Salk created the first polio vaccine, and by the 1970s the disease was considered eradicated in the United States. While it is still considered endemic in 125 countries worldwide, in less than a century thanks to modern science and human ingenuity, this deadly disease has been virtually eliminated and is no longer a cause of great fear and human suffering.*

— This has been your very banal report —

Special Author’s Note: This article, the first ever at The Banality Report, is dedicated to my mother. She contracted polio at the age of two years. She luckily recovered with minimal overall damage. She can still remember the smell of the hot woolen compresses used to treat her (The Kenny Method), and the disease still affects her to this day (post-polio syndrome), more than 70 years later.

Children, Polio patients gathered in a room. — (Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) Young polio patients read letters from home while gathered around mailroom desk during mail call at FDR’s Georgia Warm Springs Foundation while receiving intensive treatment.

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Learn more about Polio, how it is treated, and about the heroes who eradicated it in the sources used in this article listed below:

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