60 Fun Facts About Polio

Polio is caused by what kind of pathogen?

The poliovirus is an enterovirus that colonises the throat and gut before, rarely, invading the nervous system.

Roughly what share of poliovirus infections cause no symptoms at all?

Most of the rest bring only sore throat and fever; permanent paralysis is a rare outcome.

Polio occurs naturally in which species?

That is why eradication is possible at all: there is no animal reservoir to reseed the virus.

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

It can also pass by the oral-oral route, and infected people shed virus for up to six weeks without symptoms.

Which English physician gave the first clinical description of polio in 1789?

He described it as "a debility of the lower extremities".

Which Austrian immunologist, famed for discovering blood groups, identified the poliovirus in 1909?

He is best remembered for the ABO blood group system, which won him a Nobel Prize.

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

A fake CIA vaccination clinic in Abbottabad in 2011 destroyed local trust in vaccinators.

The Greek root polios in the word poliomyelitis means what?

With myelos (marrow), it names inflammation of the grey matter of the spinal cord.

How many serotypes of wild poliovirus have been identified?

Type 2 was certified eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019; only type 1 remains in the wild.

Which wild poliovirus strain was certified as eradicated in 2015?

Type 3 followed in 2019, leaving type 1 as the only wild strain still circulating.

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

Depending on the site, paralytic polio is classed as spinal, bulbar or bulbospinal.

What name is given to muscle weakness appearing decades after recovery from the disease?

It affects 25 to 50 percent of childhood survivors of paralytic polio and is not infectious.

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

The patient's head stays outside while the pressure inside the cylinder is cycled up and down.

Louis Shaw and which Harvard professor developed the first widely used negative-pressure respirator?

It was powered by an electric motor and air pumps taken from two vacuum cleaners.

The Drinker respirator was first used clinically in 1928 on an eight-year-old girl in which city?

She recovered within a minute of being placed in the chamber, which helped popularise the device.

A cheaper, lighter tank respirator called the Both respirator was invented in 1938 in which country?

William Morris, Lord Nuffield, paid to make Both-Nuffield respirators and gave them to hospitals across the British Empire.

The Drinker respirator was initially developed to treat victims of what?

Polio made it famous only later, in the epidemics of the mid-20th century.

Which future US president was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at age 39?

A 2003 study argued his illness may actually have been Guillain-Barre syndrome.

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

He had fallen into the cold Bay of Fundy the day before the chills and back pain began.

Roosevelt bought a Georgia resort in 1926 to turn it into a polio rehabilitation centre. What was it called?

He taught himself a swivelling "two-point walk" there in iron braces, gripping a strong companion's arm.

Under what name was the March of Dimes founded by Roosevelt in 1938?

Basil O'Connor ran it for more than three decades and built over 3,100 county chapters.

Which entertainer coined the name "March of Dimes" as a pun on a newsreel series?

He was punning on The March of Time; within days the White House mailroom was swamped with 2,680,000 dimes.

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

Lapel pins were sold for ten cents each, and 80,000 letters arrived by 29 January 1938.

Who developed the inactivated (injected) polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh?

He announced it as safe on 12 April 1955 and famously declined to patent it.

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

The vaccine has been estimated at 7 billion dollars had it been patented; lawyers found no patentable novelty anyway.

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

Salk had wanted to stay private, and the 1955 media onslaught made that impossible.

What is the Salk vaccine's virus treated with to inactivate it?

The virus is grown in monkey kidney tissue culture before being chemically killed.

Which scientist led the 1954 field trial of Salk's vaccine, then the largest medical experiment ever?

It eventually involved 1.8 million children in 44 states, and Francis had been Salk's mentor in influenza research.

What were the roughly one million children who tested Salk's vaccine in 1954 nicknamed?

Salk had already injected 43 children in 1952 and his own children in 1953.

In 1955 improperly inactivated vaccine from which pharmaceutical company caused 260 cases of polio?

Eleven children died, and the scandal tarnished the injected vaccine in the public mind.

Who developed the oral polio vaccine that uses live, weakened virus?

He was born Abram Saperstejn in Bialystok and later served as president of Israel's Weizmann Institute.

The oral polio vaccine is famously delivered on drops or infused into what?

At about 15 to 20 US cents a dose it became the workhorse of eradication campaigns.

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

Soviet scientist Mikhail Chumakov organised it, and the vaccine is sometimes called the Sabin-Chumakov vaccine.

Sabin's first clinical trials of his oral vaccine in late 1954 took place at what kind of institution?

He had first taken the vaccine himself, along with family and colleagues.

The oral polio vaccine was licensed for use in the United States in which year?

Sabin had to overcome the March of Dimes, which backed Salk's killed vaccine.

Which researcher first demonstrated a polio vaccine in 1950, using a live virus people drank?

His vaccine was never approved in the United States but was given to about a million people in Belgian Africa.

John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins won the 1954 Nobel Prize for what polio breakthrough?

Their 1948-49 work made cheap large-scale vaccine production possible.

The worst polio outbreak in US history, with nearly 58,000 cases, came in which year?

That year 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with some paralysis.

Modern intensive care units trace their origin to a 1952 polio centre in which city?

Danish anaesthesiologist Bjorn Ibsen set it up at the Blegdam Hospital and founded the first dedicated ICU a year later.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in which year?

It is led by the WHO, UNICEF and the Rotary Foundation, and originally aimed to finish the job by 2000.

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

By 2022 the confirmed count was 30, in just three countries.

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

As of 2026, only smallpox (1980) and the cattle plague rinderpest (2011) had been fully eradicated.

World Polio Day on 24 October marks the birthday of which person?

Rotary International established the day; the Polio Hall of Fame is at Warm Springs, Georgia.

The last known wild polio case in the Americas was a boy in which country in 1991?

Europe followed in 2002 and the WHO South-East Asia Region, including India, in 2014.

What is India's annual mass vaccination campaign for under-fives, launched in 1994, called?

India was declared polio-free in March 2014 after its last case in January 2011.

A 2003 fatwa claiming the vaccine caused sterility set back eradication in the north of which country?

Polio then spread from there to several other countries; Africa was finally declared free of wild polio in 2020.

Africa was declared free of wild poliovirus in which year?

Cases of vaccine-derived type 2 virus still appear there, and imported cases hit Malawi and Mozambique in 2022.

A 2011 CIA operation in Pakistan used a fake clinic offering vaccination against what?

It was an attempt to locate Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad; 66 vaccinators were killed in 2013-14.

Which improved oral vaccine, made less likely to revert to virulence, won full WHO licensure in December 2023?

Development began in 2011 because the traditional oral vaccine can, rarely, mutate back into a paralysing form.

In 1963 Salk founded a research institute in which Californian community?

He spent his last years there searching for a vaccine against HIV.

Before the 20th century, polio was commonly known by what name because of the age group it struck?

Ironically, better sanitation raised the age of first exposure and made paralysis more common.

Which Scottish novelist, lamed in his right leg in 1773, may be the earliest recorded polio case?

A 'severe teething fever' took the power of his right leg; polio was unknown to medicine at the time.

Which Roman emperor is theorised to have had childhood polio, explaining his lifelong limp?

Ancient Egyptian art also shows otherwise healthy people with withered limbs and children walking with canes.

Which Swedish physician was the first to empirically study a polio epidemic, in 1890?

His work, with Jakob Heine's earlier classification, led to polio being called Heine-Medin disease for a time.

In which US state was the first recognised American polio epidemic, with 132 cases, in 1894?

It followed a cluster of 26 cases in Boston the year before; an 1841 Louisiana outbreak was the first multi-case report.

The 1916 US polio epidemic was officially announced on 17 June in which New York borough?

That year brought 27,363 cases and 7,130 deaths nationwide, with names and addresses of the sick printed daily in the press.

In the 1930s an iron lung cost about $1,500, roughly the same as what?

Patients could be encased for months or years, and even with the machine bulbar polio killed more than 90 percent.

Which Danish anaesthesiologist pioneered hand-bagging polio patients via tracheostomy in 1952?

His first patient saved this way was 12-year-old Vivi Ebert; he later built an automated positive-pressure ventilator.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny, whose hot-pack therapy challenged immobilisation, came from where?

She arrived in North America in 1940 and later founded the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute in Minnesota.

With the WHO and UNICEF, which body co-led the global polio eradication effort begun in 1988?

The campaign has relied largely on the oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin and Mikhail Chumakov.