Dr.Jonas Salk administered one of the first polio shots.
On February 23, 1954, a group of children from Arsenal
Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receive the
first injections of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr.
Jonas Salk (above). Thanks to the vaccine, by the 21st
century polio cases were reduced by 99 percent worldwide.
Though not as devastating as the plague or influenza,
poliomyelitis was a highly contagious disease that emerged
in terrifying outbreaks and seemed impossible to stop.
Attacking the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous
system, polio caused muscle deterioration, paralysis and even
death. Even as medicine vastly improved in the first half of the
20th century in the Western world, polio still struck, affecting
mostly children but sometimes adults as well.
The most famous victim of a 1921 outbreak in America was
future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a young
politician. The disease spread quickly, leaving his legs
permanently paralyzed.
