59 Fun Facts About Polio

Which film director was bedridden with polio as a boy and passed the time staging puppet shows?

Francis Ford Coppola soon went from puppets to pictures: while still a schoolboy he began making his own 8mm films.

What do most people infected with poliovirus experience?

No symptoms: roughly seven in ten infections pass unnoticed, yet those people still shed the virus for weeks, which let polio move silently from house to house.

Because poliovirus has no animal reservoir, it could become the second human disease ever eradicated, after which one?

Smallpox's last natural case, a Somali hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin, recovered and spent years as a polio vaccinator, telling wary parents his own story.

What is the main route by which polio spreads from person to person?

Fecal-oral: because infected people shed the virus in stool, health agencies now test sewage to catch polio circulating in a city before anyone is paralysed.

Which singer took his polio shot in front of news cameras in 1956?

Elvis Presley rolled up his sleeve at a television studio before going on air, recruited because so few teenagers were getting the new vaccine.

Karl Landsteiner, who helped identify the virus behind polio, is best remembered for discovering what?

Blood groups made his name in 1901; his polio proof came from grinding up the spinal cord of a child who had died of it and passing the disease to laboratory animals.

In October 2023, wild poliovirus was still endemic in which two countries?

Pakistan and Afghanistan are treated by health agencies as one epidemiological block: families crossing their long shared border keep carrying the virus from one country to the other.

The Greek root polios in the word poliomyelitis means what?

Grey: joined with myelos, marrow, it describes the inflamed grey matter of the spinal cord, the damage that causes the paralysis.

Which country found the last wild type 2 poliovirus case, in 1999?

India's city of Aligarh reported that final type 2 case; the strain, one of three, was declared eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019, leaving type 1 as the only wild poliovirus.

Which world-famous violinist has performed seated since polio struck him at the age of four?

Itzhak Perlman took up the violin after hearing it on the radio, and by thirteen he had left Israel to study at the Juilliard School.

Which part of the body does paralytic polio most often affect?

The legs: the virus destroys the spinal cord's motor nerve cells unevenly, so the weakness is usually lopsided, with one leg hit harder than the other.

Post-polio syndrome, striking decades after infection, put which Sri Lanka-based science-fiction author in a wheelchair?

Arthur C. Clarke lived with the syndrome for years; when he turned 90 he recorded a farewell message to his friends and fans, a few months before he died in 2008.

What is the popular name for the negative-pressure ventilator used to keep polio patients breathing?

Iron lung: it grew out of research on reviving victims of gas poisoning, paid for by a gas company, before the polio epidemics made it a household name.

Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw built the first widely used mechanical respirator, a lifeline for polio patients, at which university?

Harvard's team first tried it on an eight-year-old girl at the nearby Children's Hospital, who revived within minutes of the pump being switched on.

Which Canadian singer-songwriter, paralysed by polio at nine, said her spine was 'twisted up like a train wreck'?

Joni Mitchell spent weeks in hospital as a child, and she said the illness came back 'with a vengeance' forty years later, wasting her muscles.

In July 2022 health officials announced that polio had paralysed an unvaccinated young adult in which US state?

New York traced the case to Rockland County, then found the virus in the wastewater of several counties, a sign that it had been spreading unseen.

Polio outbreaks made parents across the US dread which season?

Summer brought an epidemic somewhere in the country year after year, so parents kept children out of swimming pools and movie theaters and warned them off public drinking fountains.

Before any child received Salk's experimental vaccine, which animals proved it could prevent paralysis?

Monkeys stood in for children because few other animals catch polio at all; once the killed vaccine protected them, Salk moved on to human trials.

Roosevelt fell ill in August 1921 at his family's holiday home on which island?

Campobello, in Canada's New Brunswick, was the family's holiday retreat; he fell overboard into the icy Bay of Fundy, and the next day the back pain and weakness began.

Which Georgia resort did Roosevelt buy in 1926 and turn into a polio rehabilitation centre?

Warm Springs drew him from 1924 for its naturally warm mineral pools; when the resort ran into money trouble two years later, he bought it rather than let it close.

Once the vaccines had tamed polio, the March of Dimes turned its fundraising to preventing what?

Birth defects became its new cause once polio was beaten, and the charity went on to champion folic acid and newborn screening for healthier pregnancies.

Which software tycoon's foundation joined the global polio eradication drive in 2007 and became one of its biggest funders?

Bill Gates's foundation calls ending polio a top priority, and beyond paying for campaigns it has funded the development of safer vaccines for stopping outbreaks.

The first March of Dimes appeal asked Americans to send dimes to the White House ahead of what date?

Roosevelt's birthday already meant charity balls for polio; radio star Eddie Cantor added a plea for 'a march of dimes to reach all the way to the White House', and millions arrived.

Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine in a laboratory at which university?

Pittsburgh's lab produced a vaccine Salk trusted enough to inject into himself and his own family in 1953, a year before the national trial.

Asked on television who owned the patent on his vaccine, Salk replied "Could you patent the ..." what?

Sun: his full answer began 'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent.' He never earned a cent from the vaccine, preferring it be distributed as widely as possible.

Which broadcaster told Salk "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you — you've lost your anonymity"?

Edward R. Murrow said it on the night the vaccine was declared a success; Salk later agreed, calling celebrity contrary to what a scientist is supposed to be.

Which chemical, also used to preserve specimens, kills the virus in Salk's polio vaccine?

Formaldehyde leaves the virus unable to cause disease but still able to prompt antibodies, a method Salk had already used on a flu vaccine in the 1940s.

Which Depression-era photographer walked with a lifelong limp after catching polio at seven?

Dorothea Lange went on regardless to open her own portrait studio at 23 and, in 1936, to take Migrant Mother, the best-known photograph of the Depression.

What nickname was given to the schoolchildren who took part in the 1954 trial of Salk's vaccine?

Polio Pioneers were aged six to nine; in some areas half got the vaccine and half a placebo, in a trial run by Thomas Francis, Salk's old mentor from flu research.

The 1955 vaccine 'incident' that halted polio vaccinations across the US is named after which company?

Cutter Laboratories of California shipped batches in which the virus had survived, and children were paralysed; vaccinations resumed only once tighter safety standards were in place.

In 1979 wild polio spread across several Midwestern states through which largely unvaccinated religious group?

The Amish outbreak proved to be the last of its kind: no wild poliovirus has been caught inside the United States since, and the country counts polio eliminated from 1979.

The oral polio vaccine was famously given to children as drops on what?

Sugar cubes made the dose painless: when songwriter Robert Sherman's son said his vaccine came on a lump of sugar, Mary Poppins gained 'A Spoonful of Sugar'.

Sabin's oral vaccine was first mass-produced and used at scale in which country?

The Soviet Union ran trials on millions of children in 1959 because America, content with Salk's shots, would not stage one; only in 1961 did the United States license the vaccine.

Eradication campaigns chose Sabin's oral drops over Salk's injections partly because the drops also do what?

Stop the virus spreading: a swallowed vaccine builds immunity in the gut, so a protected child no longer passes wild virus on, while an injection shields only the child who gets it.

The oldest hint of polio is a carving, over 3,000 years old, of a man leaning on a staff from which civilisation?

Ancient Egypt's stele shows him with one thin, wasted limb; if that is polio, as many doctors think, the disease was crippling people 3,000 years before it had a name.

Which Caribbean country launched nationwide polio vaccination campaigns with the oral vaccine in 1962?

Cuba's mass drives ended polio on the island that same year, an early sign that the disease could be wiped out for good.

John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins made polio vaccines possible by learning to do what with the virus?

Grow it in cell cultures: they showed the virus would multiply in ordinary human tissue in a test tube, which gave vaccine makers all the virus they needed.

US polio cases peaked in 1952, when voters elected which president?

Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected as polio killed more than 3,000 people and paralysed over 21,000 that year; a vaccine was licensed on his watch in 1955.

Which hospital unit grew out of Copenhagen's 1952 polio epidemic, when students hand-ventilated patients?

Intensive care unit: relays of students squeezed rubber bags around the clock, deaths among the worst cases fell sharply, and the first dedicated ward opened in the city the next year.

Which honour eluded Jonas Salk all his life, despite the fame his polio vaccine brought him?

The Nobel Prize never came: many fellow scientists resented his celebrity and felt he had not shared the credit, and he was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences either.

Roughly how many wild polio cases were estimated worldwide in 1988, when eradication began?

350,000 cases a year meant about a thousand children paralysed every day, in more than 125 countries; the yearly count has since fallen by over 99%.

Besides polio, which disease became the target of a global eradication drive in the 1980s?

Guinea worm afflicted about 3.5 million people a year in the mid-1980s; a campaign led by Jimmy Carter's foundation had cut that to about a dozen cases a year by 2025.

Campaigning by polio survivors helped win which landmark US law in 1990?

The Americans with Disabilities Act capped two decades of pressure from people who had left polio wards to find schools and workplaces closed to them.

Which European capital found poliovirus in its sewage in 2022, though no case of paralysis followed?

London found the virus in sewage samples taken between February and May, a sign that it had probably been passing silently between people in a country whose last wild case was in 1984.

A 2003 boycott, sparked by claims that polio vaccine caused sterility, set back eradication in the north of which country?

Nigeria's northern states suspended their vaccination campaigns; the virus surged back and spread from there to several other countries.

Which leader launched the 'Kick Polio Out of Africa' campaign?

Nelson Mandela, then South Africa's president, fronted the 1996 drive when polio was paralysing some 75,000 African children a year; in 2020 Africa was certified free of the wild virus.

After the CIA's fake vaccination ruse was exposed in 2011, which group banned polio vaccinators?

The Taliban cited the ruse, a sham hepatitis B drive meant to collect DNA near Osama bin Laden's hideout, and in December 2012 nine vaccine workers were murdered.

A redesigned oral polio vaccine cleared by the WHO in 2023 was engineered to avoid what?

Reverting to a harmful form is the old oral vaccine's rare flaw: where too few children are immunised, its weakened virus can circulate and regain the power to paralyse.

Jonas Salk founded his own research institute in which Californian community?

La Jolla's clifftop institute, designed with architect Louis Kahn, is where Salk spent his final years pursuing a vaccine against AIDS.

Which organisation buys and delivers the vaccine for the worldwide campaign to end polio?

UNICEF supplies the vaccine and the persuasion as well, building the trust among wary parents that the campaign depends on.

Which Edinburgh-born novelist was left permanently lame by a childhood illness now believed to have been polio?

Sir Walter Scott was sent to recover on his grandparents' farm in the Borders, where the ballads and legends he heard as a lame child fed the novels that made him famous.

Which Roman emperor's lifelong limp was long blamed on childhood polio?

Claudius was hidden away by a family embarrassed by his limp, stammer and twitching; scholars now think cerebral palsy a likelier cause than polio.

Cells taken without her consent from which woman in 1951 were later mass-produced to test Salk's polio vaccine?

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer that year; her tumour cells were the first to keep multiplying in the lab, which gave vaccine testers an endless supply.

Which children's board game was invented by a polio patient to amuse the children recovering in hospital with her?

Candy Land was the work of teacher Eleanor Abbott, herself ill with polio; at her friends' urging she sent it to Milton Bradley, which put it on sale in 1949.

The 1916 polio epidemic that killed over 2,000 people in the largest US city was declared in which borough?

Brooklyn: health officials announced the epidemic there that June, and frightened towns nearby posted signs barring children under sixteen from entering.

Which sprinter, who wore a brace as a child after polio, won three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics?

Wilma Rudolph, the twentieth of twenty-two children, shed her brace and took up basketball; at a high-school game a college track coach spotted her and invited her to train with his squad.

Which painter caught polio at the age of six and walked with a limp for the rest of her life?

Frida Kahlo spent months in bed with the disease. Her father then pushed her into sports to rebuild her strength, at a time when few girls were encouraged to play them.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny, a self-taught bush nurse, outraged doctors in the 1940s by treating polio patients with what?

Hot packs and exercise replaced the splints and casts that doctors insisted on. Her title was no nun's: 'Sister' was the rank she earned as an army nurse in the First World War.

Which service club pledged $120 million in 1985 to vaccinate the world's children against polio?

Rotary International called its campaign PolioPlus, and the pledge spurred the World Health Assembly to set the goal of wiping the disease out altogether.