ANDRZEJ KRAUZETo get an idea of the terrible dread that polio used to evoke in your parents or grandparents, read the opening chapter of Nemesis, Philip Roth’s aptly named 2010 novel set in 1944 in a steamy Newark, New Jersey, neighborhood. Roth’s outbreak is fictional, but ever since the first US polio epidemic in June 1916, summer’s arrival came with the fear of infection, and parents often limited whom their children could play with and where they were allowed to go.
And that dread was not an overreaction. Although sporadic polio outbreaks occurred every summer, 1952 saw the worst epidemic in the United States, with almost 58,000 reported cases. Of those, 3,145 people died and 21,269 suffered paralysis ranging from mild to disabling. The development of the Salk vaccine three years later, followed by the introduction of an oral vaccine, turned polio from a frightening nemesis to a disease virtually eradicated in industrialized countries.
Polio and guinea worm disease are on the brink of total eradication.
But worldwide, the picture was vastly different. In 1988, when an initiative was launched to stamp out polio worldwide, 1,000 children around the globe were crippled by the infection every day. Epidemiologists and public-health workers set out with the firm ...
