Jonas Salk's A Summer Plague: Polio

Polio is known as the “crippling and potentially deadly infectious disease. It is caused by the poliovirus. The virus spreads from person to person and can invade an infected person’s brain and spinal cord, causing paralysis (can’t move parts of the body)”as said by the CDC. Jonas Salk encountered polio in everyday life and he started to create the vaccine. Now in the 21st century Polio is very rare and there is zero known cases in the US. Jonas Salk explored the many strings of the virus and used many dissimilar versions to create varying vaccines that could possibly work in destroying polio. Before the initiation of the Polio vaccine it was not infrequent for someone to have been diagnosed. Daniel Salk, Jonas’s eldest son, was diagnosed with
Polio is a disease that may cause the spine to be weakened making a person paralyzed, or not able to move some parts of the body. “Jonas Salk now belonged to the public, to humanity, more than to science. We love this young man in white- a hero of test-tube magic, a savior of little children, yet a modest person who asked nothing but to be left alone with his cherished research.” As said in the book A Summer Plague: Polio and the Survivors by Tony Gould. Before the IPV the kids that had polio caused things like the game Candy Land, and Milky Way bars to be invented for entertainment, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt also had an impact because a coin was made in his honor of his fight of Polio during his Presidency of twelve years. Polio also made the clothing companies create different size clothing, for example shoes were created in two different sizes for one person to fit the needs of the different body types diagnosed with polio. Another social impact was that some public spaces were made to adapt to people that had polio, for example the reserved area in a public bathroom, or the two different heights of water fountains. It also allowed for the physicians to improve on the “Iron Lung” a device that helped people that were able to get to the doctor before the later stages of polio. “Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw at Harvard University devised a version of a tank respirator
Polio has been dealt with in many of the countries around the world. It originally was expected to be demolished in 2000, but that date has soon been forgotten. The hardest place to get the polio virus has been in Nigeria, tension has arisen and now the people of the African country are informing people to avoid getting the polio vaccine because they believe it could cause Polio as much as it could help. The vaccine has been given to be all around the world and from one country, that is thought to have started it, has avoided it, it is starting to spread to other countries “that were once polio-free” as said by the Centre for International