Polio, a virus easily transmitted by contact and via the air, was a devastating disease. It could paralyze, rendering its victims unable to walk or breathe, or it could kill.
Poliomyelitis met its match in 1962 when Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine was licensed. Though polio is almost unheard of in this day and age, before Salk's breakthrough it left children and adults alike weak and crippled and in many cases people spent the remainder of their lives in iron lungs, the only mechanism by which they could breath after the virus crippled their nervous system and they lost the ability to breathe on their own.
With worldwide eradication efforts implemented by the World Health Organization in 1988, the disease is essentially gone from the Earth.
Two of the more famous victims of the disease were our 32nd President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the country out of the depression and guided it through World War II, until his death in his third term on April 12, 1945, and athelete Wilma Rudolph, the 20th of 22 children who overcame polio in childhood to become a gold-medal winning Olympic runner (earning her nicknames of The Tennessee Tornado and La Gazella Nera (the Black Gazelle).
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