There was a time when the word itself was enough to strike fear into the hearts of people around the world. Polio: a highly infectious virus that could shatter young lives in the blink of an eye.
On October 24th, we mark World Polio Day, and this is something worth celebrating. Because whilst the story isn’t over yet, it may well be nearing its end.
Polio has been around since before records began, but it wasn’t until the early-twentieth century that epidemics began to sweep through communities in Europe and America, affecting many thousands of children and families.
It’s hard to underestimate the terror once caused by polio. At its height in the 1950s, parents routinely lived in fear of their children becoming quarantined, paralysed or even worse. It was a dark time in medical history but, despite this, polio really is a success story for modern science.
These days, the virus is almost extinct. So how did we go from having hundreds of thousands of cases every year to less than a hundred? Well, it started with a young medical doctor named Jonas Salk, whose brilliant mind helped to save countless lives from the grips of the disease.
It was Salk’s vaccine – created using inactive virus particles – that transformed the fight against polio. Within years, the number of cases plummeted, as millions of doses were administered around the globe.
By the latter part of the twentieth century, polio had been eradicated in the western world, and it hasn’t been seen in the UK since 1984. But the battle is not yet over.
Polio remains endemic in three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. Political instability and infrastructure shortcomings mean wiping out polio in these regions is a real challenge. But there are things that science can do to help.
Polio will never be truly dead whilst we continue to use vaccines like Salk’s, which rely on inactivated virus particles to induce immunity. That’s because these vaccines require mass-production of polio so as to provide virus material for the vaccine. As long as we continue to do this, polio must always exist.