Polio Then and Now

Polio was once one of the most feared diseases globally. A highly infectious disease with no cure, polio spread rapidly through communities and left devastation in its wake. Every year, thousands of children used to be killed and hundreds of thousands paralyzed.

Today, thanks to global efforts and innovative tools, polio cases are down 99.9%. With wild poliovirus restricted to just a few high-risk geographies, the world has an historic opportunity to stop virus transmission for good.

Explore the images below to learn about the devastation of polio’s past and the progress made toward a polio-free world.

With a final push, we can prevent the past from becoming the future and make polio history.

Polio Then
A Dreaded Disease
Polio Now
The Final Stretch

1916A huge polio outbreak in the U.S. paralyses 27,000 and kills 6,000, activating a surge of research to stop the virus.

1929The ‘iron lung’ – an artificial respirator that helps paralyzed polio patients breathe – becomes widely used in Europe and the U.S.

1955Dr. Jonas Salk develops the first vaccine against polio – an injectable, inactivated polio vaccine (IPV).

1961Dr. Albert Sabin develops a live oral polio vaccine (OPV) which rapidly becomes the vaccine of choice for most national immunization programs in the world.

1961-1962Polio cases drastically increase in 24 of the 34 African countries with recorded polio cases.

1985Rotary International launches PolioPlus, the first and largest internationally coordinated private-sector support of a public health initiative.

1988The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is launched, as polio paralyzes more than 1,000 children every day in over 125 countries.

2000There is a 99% reduction in wild poliovirus, but variant poliovirus outbreaks raise concern.

2002The WHO European region is certified free of wild poliovirus.

2011Development of a next-generation vaccine, nOPV2, begins to more sustainably stop variant poliovirus outbreaks.

2015Wild poliovirus type 2 is declared eradicated.

2019Wild poliovirus type 3 is declared eradicated.

2020The WHO African region is certified free of wild poliovirus type 1, leaving the virus endemic in only Pakistan and Afghanistan.

2021Rollout of nOPV2 begins. Since then, close to 670 million doses have been administered across 31 countries and data continues to show its promise as a tool to end variant poliovirus type 2 outbreaks, the most prevalent form of the virus.

2023Wild poliovirus transmission is restricted to two provinces in Afghanistan and seven districts in Pakistan, while 80% of variant poliovirus cases globally are constrained to 4 subnational geographies – northern Nigeria, south central Somalia, eastern DRC, and northern Yemen.