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Polio
About Polio
Franklin D. Roosevelt was paralyzed at age 39 by an illness diagnosed as polio. Iron lungs kept thousands alive in the 1950s. Salk vaccine was declared safe in 1955, Sabin oral vaccine in 1961. There were an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988, falling to a few dozen wild cases a year by the 2020s. Only Pakistan and Afghanistan remain endemic.
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