Aug 13, 2022 3 min read

Thanks to the vaccine painstakingly developed by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, the majority of the 8 billion people alive on Earth today have never known a time when the possibly of contracting polio was a daily worry.

Before the vaccine was first made available in 1954, it was not uncommon for cases to rampage through American communities and for parents to fret obsessively that their children could fall victim to it. For those who did, the result was a tough bout with flu-like symptoms. For an estimated 15,000 people per year who were less lucky, however, the result was paralysis. Polio also claimed some adult victims, with Franklin Roosevelt being the most prominent example. He was permanently paralyzed from the waist down after contracting polio at age 39, just one year after he was the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in the 1920 election. During his second term in the White House, Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which laid the foundation for the development of vaccines that have done so much to make polio into a distant memory for almost everyone.

The fact that it has become so uncommon made the recent headlines about cases emerging in New York state seem all the more menacing. After more than two years of wrestling with COVID-19 and the appearance of monkeypox, the last thing any of us need is the resurrection of a highly contagious and potentially debilitating disease. Officials have counseled against alarm, saying a widespread outbreak is unlikely. Still, it’s a reminder that polio has not yet been fully stamped out. And if COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t count on being in a safe cocoon if there’s a flare-up in a distant locale that Americans would never think about visiting. Fully eradicating polio everywhere is something we all should be concerned about.

In recent years, polio has been endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, two countries where vaccination has been spotty. Cases have also been reported in pockets of Asia and Africa. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has been pushing for additional testing and screening, and the organization has reported that the coronavirus pandemic slowed efforts at polio vaccination because of concerns that those going door to door would be bringing COVID-19 along with them. Experts say that the key to eradicating polio would be injecting children with the Salk vaccine, rather than a less effective oral vaccine. They also say that polio could well and thoroughly be eradicated like smallpox in this decade, but the price tag would be almost $5 billion.

That might prove to be money exceptionally well-spent. Dr. Anana Bandyopadhyay, the polio program leader at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pointed out to Kaiser Health News that, on an interconnected planet, “polio is potentially a plane ride away as long as the virus still exists in some corner of the world.”