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.