polio

Scientists in Britain have detected multiple versions of the virus in wastewater. Officials say the risk to the public is extremely low and urge people to ensure their polio vaccines are up to date.

Countries in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia are counting more cases of vaccine-derived polio. One reason for this, say experts, is that vaccination efforts have lapsed during the pandemic.

From the first vaccine (for smallpox) the questions have been the same. How do we transport it? Who's next to get it? Why so much hesitancy? The answers can be similar — or dramatically different.

This isn't the first big vaccine rollout, and the past holds lessons for the pandemic present. Here's a look at how the polio vaccine overcame U.S. hesitancy.

The pandemic has slowed efforts to eradicate the contagious disease. Yet the country's polio effort offers insights on the launch of its coronavirus vaccine campaign.

It looked as if polio would be the second human disease to be eliminated — after smallpox. But "2020 has been a terrible year," the head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative says.

The Kick Polio Out of Africa Campaign began in 1996. This week, the World Health Organization announced that wild polio has been eradicated — although there is a caveat.

When he was 9 years old, Salk was inoculated by the polio vaccine developed by his father, Dr. Jonas Salk. Today, he is an optimistic about a COVID-19 vaccine but offers a warning.

In the 1950s, as Dr. Jonas Salk and virologist Albert Sabin worked to create a vaccine to prevent infantile paralysis, the threat from polio was already long familiar to Americans.

The children and preteens of the U.S. polio epidemic of the 1940s and '50s are once again in a high-risk group, this time for coronavirus. They recall their experiences and the parallels to today.

The topics range from a ticking time bomb in the Arctic to the art of taking selfies in an ethical way. Here are the stories selected by our contributors.

Health officials have long known that virus from the oral vaccine can contaminate water supplies; they underestimated how big a problem this would be.