polio

And polio, the fearsome nemesis of American families in the 1950s, from 16,300 to zero.

A small number of people infected with polio - between one in a thousand and one in a hundred - develop more serious problems that can lead to paralysis.

I suspect that none of the parents who volunteered for Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine trial were hoping their children were in the placebo group.

Thus, there are few things Westerners take for granted more than reduced child mortality, reduced death in child birth and the eradication of history’s most brutal diseases like polio and smallpox.

Nor was it ever used in vaccines against chicken pox, polio or pneumonia.