polio

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.

Childhood vaccines are often subsidized in the poorest countries. But not for those moving up the wealth ladder.

The World Health Organization is celebrating the eradication of another strain of the polio virus. Yet major challenges remain in the global effort to get rid of the disease.

There is cause for optimism — and for despair. One statistic is so distressing that the Red Cross calls it "a hideous milestone for the 21st century."

That's one of the themes in the new book 'Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity.'