Polio
paralytic disease. The causative agent, a virus called poliovirus (PV), enters the body orally, infecting the intestinal lining. It may proceed to the blood stream and into the central nervous system causing paralysis and muscle weakness.
The effects of a polio infection have been recorded since prehistory. Egyptian paintings and carvings depict otherwise healthy people with withered limbs, walking with canes at a young age, etc. The Roman emperor Claudius was stricken as a child; he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921 and was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life as a result.
General
Polio may be spread through contact with feces or through airborne particles.
The first effective polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk, and inoculations of children against polio began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 23, 1954. Through mass immunization, the disease was wiped out in the Americas, although it recently has re-appeared in Haiti, where political strife and poverty have interfered with vaccination efforts.
Young children who contract polio are likely to suffer only mild symptoms, and as a result they may become permanently immune to the disease. Hence inhabitants of areas with better sanitation may actually be more susceptible to polio because fewer people have the disease as young children. People who have survived polio sometimes develop additional symptoms, notably muscle weakness, decades later; these symptoms are called post-polio syndrome.
The first medical report on poliomyelitis was by Jakob Heine in 1840. Karl Oskar Medin was the first to empirically study a poliomyelitis epidemic in 1890. The work of these two physicians has led to the disease being known as the Heine-Medin disease.
Eradication efforts
In 1988, the World Health Organization passed a resolution to eradicate polio by 2000, a measure which was inspired by Rotary International's 1985 pledge to raise $120 million toward immunizing all of the world's children against the disease. The current plan calls for a stop of spreading the virus by 2005. Most remaining polio infections are located in two areas: the Indian sub-continent and Nigeria. Eradication efforts in the Indian sub-continent have met with a large measure of success. The Indian Government started the Plus-Polio Campaign to get rid of polio. Most families allowed their children to take the vaccine. Some Muslim families refused due to false rumors that the vaccine causes sterility in boys.
If polio is eradicated it will be the second disease to eradicated. The first one was smallpox.
In the Kano province in Northern Nigeria, which operates under Sharia (Muslim religious law), the immunisation campaign was suspended in September 2003 when prominent Muslim leaders said they suspected that vaccines supplied by Western donors were adulterated to reduce fertility and spread HIV as part of a US-led drive against Islam. The WHO said, on June 30, 2004 that Kano had pledged to restart the campaign in early July, after a 10-month ban during which the virus spread across Nigeria and into 10 other African countries that were previously polio-free.
In July 2004 the World Health Organization warned of "uncontrolled transmission of polio virus" in northern Nigeria. Travelers there were advised to get polio vaccine boosters. As of the last two weeks of June 2004, there had been 62 new infections in Nigeria, a total of 259 confirmed polio cases in Africa's most populous nation.
