What Is Polio?

What is polio? Polio is an infectious disease that is caused by a virus. Up to 95 percent of people who are infected will not have symptoms. However, infected people who do not have polio symptoms can still spread the poliovirus and cause others to develop polio. While there is no cure for this disease, most people recover from polio without any long-term problems.

 

What Is Polio? -- An Overview

Polio (also known as poliomyelitis or infantile paralysisis) is an infectious disease that is caused by a virus. Polio used to be very common in the United States. It caused severe illness in thousands of people each year before the polio vaccine was introduced in 1955.
 

What Is Polio? -- History of Polio

Polio used to be one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century in the United States. There were usually about 13,000 to 20,000 cases of paralytic polio reported each year in the United States before the introduction of the Salk polio vaccine in 1955. Polio peaked in 1952, when there were more than 21,000 reported cases. The number of cases of polio decreased dramatically following the introduction of the vaccine and the development of a national polio vaccination program. In 1965, only 61 cases of paralytic polio were reported, compared to 2,525 cases reported cases just five years earlier in 1960.
 
The last cases of naturally occurring paralytic polio in the United States were in 1979, when an outbreak occurred among the Amish in several Midwestern states. From 1980 through 1999, there were 152 confirmed cases of paralytic polio cases reported. Of the 152 cases, eight cases were acquired outside the United States and imported. The remaining 144 cases were vaccine-associated paralytic polio caused by the live oral polio vaccine.
 
(Click History of Polio for more information.)
 
(What Is Polio? Continued: Page 2)
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Written by/reviewed by: Arthur Schoenstadt, MD
Last reviewed by: Arthur Schoenstadt, MD