Table of Contents • I. Poliomyelitis, Treatment, and Prevention Prior to 1955 • II. The Arrival of the Salk Polio Vaccine: Documents, April-July 1955 • III. Postscript - Polio Prevention after Jonas Salk • IV. Bibliography and Resources • V. Student Assignments • VI. Catalogue of Sources

Section III. Postscript - Polio Prevention after Jonas Salk

Polio vaccination efforts continued with great enthusiasm and success for the remainder of 1955 and into 1956 and 1957. In fact, by 1957, the incidence of polio in the United States had dropped by as much as 90%.

The success of polio vaccination efforts in the first few years of the program is illustrated by a 1958 statement from President Eisenhower (Document M). In an eight-sentence press release, the president "join(s) with millions of other Americans in supporting the drive for polio vaccinations this spring."

As a result of the massive effort to produce and distribute the vaccine since 1955, the flurry of activity requiring the president's personal attention in the early days of the vaccine was replaced in only three years with a short, routine statement endorsing ongoing vaccination activities.

Link to Document M - Statement by President Eisenhower on Annual Vaccination Drive, 17 May 1958

The events following the first few years of the Salk polio vaccine is well documented elsewhere and beyond the scope of this site (for more, see Bibliography and Resources).

Briefly, the history of polio prevention since 1958 begins with the clinical testing of Albert Sabin's long-awaited attenuated vaccine. Licensed in 1961, the vaccine replaced the Salk vaccine in most cases because of its oral administration via sugar cubes (unlike the injections required for the Salk vaccine) and reduced cost.

With the last case of wild polio in the United States reported in 1979, the slight risk of vaccine-associated polio caused by the Sabin oral poliovirus prompted U.S. health officials to return to a modified version of the Salk vaccine in its recommendations since 1999.

Internationally, polio affected 350,000 people in 125 countries as recently as 1988. Through an international effort with major financial contributions from Rotary International, polio was declared eradicated from the Americas in 1994, the Western Pacific in 2000, and Europe in 2002.

As of 2007, the World Health Organization reported fewer than 2,000 cases of polio worldwide, over 75% of which were located in two countries, Nigeria and India. To global health officials, the global eradication of polio first imagined by Franklin Roosevelt 70 years remains a tantalizing possibility.

Continue to Bibliography and Resources