At its peak, in the 1950s, polio paralyzed and killed up to 500,000 people per year worldwide. By the 1960s, shortly after Jonas Salk invented the vaccine in 1955, that number dropped dramatically. Polio is no longer the mass killer it once was. But it still affects a handful of kids every year—in 2015, there were 74 reported cases in just two countries, according to theWorld Health Organization (WHO). Now, thanks to the billions of vaccines administered by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) since 1988, public health officials are on the cusp of eradicating the disease, which would make it the second human-hosted virus in history to be completely wiped out (the first was smallpox, in 1980).
At its peak, in the 1950s, polio paralyzed and killed up to 500,000 people per year worldwide. By the 1960s, shortly after Jonas Salk invented the vaccine in 1955, that number dropped dramatically. Polio is no longer the mass killer it once was. But it still affects a handful of kids every year—in 2015, there were 74 reported cases in just two countries, according to theWorld Health Organization (WHO). Now, thanks to the billions of vaccines administered by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) since 1988, public health officials are on the cusp of eradicating the disease, which would make it the second human-hosted virus in history to be completely wiped out (the first was smallpox, in 1980).
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