Let’s Eradicate Polio This Winter

When the modern drive to eradicate polio began in 1988, gasoline was 90 cents a gallon, Ronald Reagan was president, you could still get shot trying to climb the Berlin Wall, and the World Wide Web was nothing more than lunchroom banter between physics geeks in a suburb of Geneva. Globalization, the internet, and global pandemics were all in our future. That year, some 350,000 people were paralyzed from poliomyelitis, a dreaded disease that conjures up tragic images of FDR in a wheelchair, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting people on crutches — perhaps the oldest known victims of polio — and mid-century American children encased in iron lungs. Thirty-five years ago it was a global disease, with outbreaks occurring in 125 countries all over the world: across Africa, in Mexico and China, throughout the Soviet Union, and in many parts of Europe. <a href="https://medium.com/neodotlife/lets-eradicate-polio-this-winter-170fed88405c">Website</a>