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About 16,000 cases of polio (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurred each year in the U.S. in the 20th century compared with none in 2020. The first polio vaccine arrives at Mayo Clinic on April 13, 1955, one day after it’s licensed in the U.S.
This interactive timeline from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative explores polio’s history from 1580 BC to 2016. The timeline traces the disease’s history from being one of the most feared diseases to one on the precipice of eradication.
In 1994, after the concerted efforts of thousands of health workers, vaccinators, epidemiologists and the immunization team at PAHO, the Region of the Americas was the first in the world to be certified polio-free by the WHO.
On August 20, 1994, the Pan American Health Organization had reported that three years had passed since the last case of wild polio in the Americas. A three-year-old Peruvian boy, Luis Fermín, had the last registered case there.
In the 1950s, summer outbreaks in the USA caused tens of thousands of cases, leaving hundreds paralysed or dead. `Second only to the atomic bomb', polio was `the thing that Americans feared the most'.
The first vertebrate virus, foot-and-mouth, was isolated in 1898, and the first human virus, yellow fever, was isolated in 1900. And in 1935, Wendell M. Stanley (AAI 1957) was the first to crystalize a virus—the TMV—and demonstrated that it was composed of protein and ribonucleic acid.
Each focuses on a different aspect of the story: the early epidemics, the various competing scientists, or the massive inoculation programme—10 million children across the Soviet Union—undertaken by Albert Sabin, pioneer of the oral vaccine, and the Russian authorities. It all begins in 1894.
