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- Your legs, arms and spinal area can be parlayed and you can also die, the paralyzes can last from years to decades.
- PPS is the reoccurring symptoms 30-40 years later and these symptoms are; physical pain, breathing difficulties, sleep disturbances, fatigue and tiredness

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I could use this article to talk about Post Polio Syndrome and what happened when you got Polio.

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This article talks about what happened to your body when you got polio  and  Post Polio Syndrome.

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- Polio started in Brooklyn and spread through NYC and then the whole country
- 80,000 pets help carry the disease and these pet were let out onto the streets where they then frighten residents.

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I could use this article to talk about how polio didn't just affect humans and explain where polio started.

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This article is about how polio affected other animals and where polio started.

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Poliomelitis is a viral infection that is transmitted orally. It can originate either from traces of feces or saliva and gets into the blood via the gastro intestinal tract.

Most people who get infected with the virus never suffer an outbreak or show symptoms. Roughly 90 percent of those who have it are unaware they are carrying the virus. They have developed an immunity against a specific strain of virus - of which there are several, however.

The iron lung was often used to respirate children suffering from polio in the 1950s
What happens to people who suffer an outbreak
It is mostly young children who suffer serious outbreaks. Polio damages the nervous system, resulting in paralysis, mostly of legs, arms and the spinal area. In the worst case, this can be fatal.

Patients can suffer from between just over a year to decades. Often, a remaining damage of polio is that an arm or a leg remains shorter than the other. In the case of the leg, this needs to be corrected in a complicated operation. Doctors must shorten the longer leg - reestablishing equality around the hip and easing the burden on the joints.

But generally, growing healthy nerves takes over the function of the damaged nerves and the paralysis symptoms eventually fade. Many patients return to a somewhat normal life after a few years of suffering.
Does it still exist?
Generally speaking, most people today are vaccinated. Vaccines are the only effective prevention against the disease. Since 1960, children have received the polio vaccine on sugar cubes. Today, vaccines are generally administered as a shot in the arm. Europe has been considered polio free since 1998, but the World Health Organisation (WHO) failed to meet it's target of worldwide polio eradication by the year 2000.

Since the 1960s children received oral vaccines. Today, they receive a shot in the arm.

Polio has returned mainly in the world's crisis regions, where medical care is lacking, countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and a number of other countries in Asia and Africa. In some cases, fanatical religious groups have used violence against medical workers administering vaccines.
Can polio return?
Yes, Post Polio Syndrome (PPS) is a result of an earlier polio infection, which often occurred in early childhood. Almost all of those who once suffered from polio will experience some degree of recurring symptoms from the viral infection - often 30 to 40 years after the disease initially took hold.

It is known that PPS is often related to excessive physical work or sports. The patients who thought that they had overcome the illness then feel a return of the symptoms: physical pain, breathing difficulties, sleep disturbances, fatigue and tiredness - often leading to life in a wheelchair.

There is only one specialized clinic for PPS patients in Germany.
PPS - a rare disease
The Post Polio Syndrom is a rare disease in the developed world. In Germany, for example, around 70.000 patients suffer from these symptoms.

As a result, research into the illness is rare; universities don't teach it, and many doctors are unaware of the symptoms. In 2001, the first specialized clinic opened in Koblenz. Now it is treating about 500 PPS patients per year. Although they can help them with exercise, rehabilitation and coping with pain, the doctors can neither slow down nor stop PPS. There is no medicine for this yet.

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Polio - a disease that haunts victims even later in life | DW | 27.10.2016

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Poliomelitis is a viral infection that is transmitted orally. It can originate either from traces of feces or saliva and gets into the blood via the gastro intestinal tract. Most people who get infected with the virus never suffer an outbreak or show symptoms. Roughly 90 percent of those who have it are unaware they are carrying the virus.

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With only 26 cases of polio worldwide this year (as of Sept. 13), the complete eradication of the disease is closer than ever. After decades of devastating populations all over the globe, polio is now endemic only in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, and it's well on its way to becoming history.

This is the result of a global eradication initiative started in 1988, when there were an estimated 350,000 cases. Thanks to worldwide vaccination drives conducted at times in the most hostile conditions, including in war zones and under totalitarian regimes, the number of cases worldwide has decreased by 99.9%.

The fight to get rid of this disease-that can cause paralysis and, at times, death-is now entering its final stretch. If we do eradicate polio entirely, it will be second infectious disease humans have completely wiped out, after smallpox.

New York Times, July 4, 1916

But while in most parts of the world polio is all but forgotten, it wasn't too long ago that large outbreaks would affect industrialized countries, including the US, where flare-ups of the disease would occur every summer. These outbreaks worsened progressively from the beginning of last century all the way to the 1950s, when polio caused an estimated 15,000 cases of paralysis every year.

In the summer of 1916, New York City was the theater of a spectacular polio outbreak, the largest at that point to occur in the US. The first case occurred in Brooklyn and the disease rapidly spread through the city. Ironically, recently-improved hygiene standards actually made people more vulnerable to the virus, since they were less likely to have been exposed to it and have developed immunity, says David W. Rose, a consultant archivist at the March of Dimes (a nonprofit founded in 1938 by president Franklin D. Roosevelt to fight polio). By the end of the outbreak, New York recorded 9,000 cases of the disease, which caused 2,400 deaths and left 1,000 children paralyzed.

It was panic. New Yorkers were absolutely terrified by the disease, then known as "infant paralysis." It didn't discriminate by class or color, and left behind a trail of death and paralysis in a spectacle of horror that appeared to target children with particular viciousness. While often causing just mild symptoms, polio can attack the nervous system and cause permanent paralysis for which-then as now-there is no cure. At the time, Rose says, little was also known about how it spread, and no vaccines were available to prevent it.

The Courier-Journal, July 11 1916

Those who could fled the city for rural areas not affected by the epidemic-The Courier-Journal called it "the exodus of the children."

Movie theaters and pools were all closed down in an effort to stop the contagion. "Bar all children from the movies in paralysis war," blared a July 4, 1916 New York Times headline. But these were typically ineffective measure, Rose says, because the virus usually spread within a household.

Children who didn't live in New York were barred from entering town for fear they may contract the disease in the city.

Polio was likened to a plague and the scapegoats were the city's bugs and mice-even though the polio virus only infects humans, and can only be transmitted through oral contact with an infected person's stool or saliva droplets.

This misconception lasted all the way up until the 1950s, when health authorities in cities across America would carry on campaigns spraying DDT to kill guiltless mosquitoes during the yearly summer polio epidemics that plagued the country.

But otherinnocent animals paid the price of the epidemics, too: thousands of cats and dogs were killed-sometimes as many as 3,700 a day-by, ironically, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals (SPCA). On July 26, 1916, the New York Times reported that SPCA representatives said they had collected 80,000 pets-72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs-from owners afraid that they would help spread the disease.

The New York Times, July 26, 1916

"We have been receiving an average of 800 requests a day for our men to call for unwanted domestic pets, mostly cats, despite the statement issued by the Health Commissioner Emerson that cats do not carry the germs of the disease," the SPCA's superintendent told the Times.

People who owned pets let them onto the streets, where they turned into so-called "pirate cats," roaming the streets and annoying or frightening residents. The SPCA would then be called to collect and kill them in their terrifyingly named "lethal chamber"-a room where they were put down through exposure to a deadly gas.

Some of the cats even became infamous criminals of sorts, like Wang, "a tailless mauve cat from Formosa" that led a group of 50 to 100 pirate cats that haunted the "pious people" of the Upper West Side, yelling at night, stealing legs of mutton (pdf) from kitchen tables, and scaring the dogs that were meant to frighten them away. Wang's gang was such a concern that SPCA made a special promise to the Times that its men were "working as hard as they can and there is no doubt that Wang and his band of cats will be rounded up in due course with the other nocturnal nomads in the city." Whether this was in fact the last of Wang is lost to the annals of history.

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100 years ago, New York City declared war against polio and killed 72,000 cats (and 8,000 dogs)

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With only 26 cases of polio worldwide this year (as of Sept. 13), the complete eradication of the disease is closer than ever. After decades of devastating populations all over the globe, polio is now endemic only in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, and it's well on its way to becoming history.

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- Kids were supposed to stay away from swimming pools, sit far away from other people at movie theaters and insurance companies were starting to sell polio insurance for newborns.
- in 1952 60,000 children had polio, thousands were paralyzed and over 3,000 kids died. They were put in iron lungs to survive.
- "Both Salk's and Sabin's vaccines are still used today. But Sabin's version, which requires just two drops in a child's mouth, proved much easier to use in mass immunization campaigns."

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I could use this article to talk about the vaccine fro polio and how that was made.

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This article is about how people made a cure for polio and the extremes that they would have to take to make sure that there child didn't get polio.

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Wiping Out Polio: How The U.S. Snuffed Out A Killer

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Wiping Out Polio: How The U.S. Snuffed Out A Killer

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Wiping Out Polio: How The U.S. Snuffed Out A Killer

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During the early 20th century, polio killed thousands of American children each summer and paralyzed many more. Now, as the world fights to eradicate the virus globally, we look back at the development of the polio vaccine and its successful deployment around the world.