New polio fears amid barriers to global eradication
- 10 years ago
It's a disease that used to leave parents around the world overcome with fear.
Would their child get polio, leaving them irreversibly paralyzed within hours?
It's something famed violinist Itzhak Perlman knows all too well.
He got polio when he was just four-years-old and living in Israel.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) VIOLINIST AND POLIO SURVIVOR ITZHAK PERLMAN, SAYING:
"First symptoms were weakness in the lower limbs, and then goodbye (laughs), and then couldn't move anymore - at least couldn't walk anymore. That was that. It was kind of like a gradual - it wasn't even gradual - it was pretty sudden. It was - one day I could walk, the next day I couldn't."
Even U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered from it -- seen here in rare footage walking at the 1937 World Series.
Then came the vaccine.
NATS 1956 film: "Randy is the first child to get injected with the Salk polio vaccine...in the field trials in 1954"
Today, most countries are
Would their child get polio, leaving them irreversibly paralyzed within hours?
It's something famed violinist Itzhak Perlman knows all too well.
He got polio when he was just four-years-old and living in Israel.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) VIOLINIST AND POLIO SURVIVOR ITZHAK PERLMAN, SAYING:
"First symptoms were weakness in the lower limbs, and then goodbye (laughs), and then couldn't move anymore - at least couldn't walk anymore. That was that. It was kind of like a gradual - it wasn't even gradual - it was pretty sudden. It was - one day I could walk, the next day I couldn't."
Even U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered from it -- seen here in rare footage walking at the 1937 World Series.
Then came the vaccine.
NATS 1956 film: "Randy is the first child to get injected with the Salk polio vaccine...in the field trials in 1954"
Today, most countries are