apr 10, 1884 - Polio 1880's

Description:

Infectious disease Poliomyelitis, also known as Polio, is caused by the poliovirus which in many cases causes a muscle weakness The first epidemic of polio in the United States was said to be in the late 1800s. In 1928, the first iron lung was introduced in Boston’s Children’s Hospital. The iron lung was a machine created to support and enable the person inside to breathe on their own in their own normal manner, even when their muscle control is lost. This negative pressure ventilator was revolutionary for managing this disease.

It was said that the worst U.S. polio outbreak was in 1952 with over 58,000 cases. Three years later, the injected Polio vaccine was debuted by Jonas Salk and in 1963 the oral polio vaccine was introduced by Albert Sabin. Due to this, throughout the 1970s, immunization programs were launched to help try to control the disease in many countries.

IPV and OPV vaccines are both very prominent in the history of polio. IPV stands for Inactive Polio Vaccine produces protective antibodies in the blood which prevents the spread of the poliovirus to the central nervous system. An advantage to this method is that there was no risk of polio paralysis due to the vaccine and a disadvantage of this is that it was more expensive and needed a medically trained person for the injection. As for OPV (which stands for Oral Polio Vaccine) it was used to stimulate the antibodies to all three types of poliovirus. An advantage of this was it was an oral transmission, inexpensive and passive immunization while a disadvantage was a rare chance of OPV causing vaccine-associated paralysis. Also, at the age of 39, Franklin D. Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio in 1921. The World Health Organization stated that polio was eradicated in the Western Pacific, Europe and the Americas in 2007.

Symptoms: This disease is transmitted 72% of infected people with polio will not have symptoms, however, people who do have symptoms will experience a sore throat, stomach pain, nausea, fever, headache, and tiredness and this will typically last from 2-5 days. More severe symptoms include affects to the brain and the spinal cord. Polio only infects humans and spreads from person-to-person contact with a fecal-oral transmission. There is a vaccine against polio and is said to be very effective as 99 out of 100 children who get all the recommended vaccines should not get the disease.

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