Polio vaccine is one of the greatest achievements of the medical science that has changed the world. Scientists and volunteers almost worked 20 years to eradicate polio.
Polio is caused by a virus called picomavirales, which affects the humans in the ages between 1 to 5 and Poliovirus was first isolated in 1909 by Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper.In 1981, the poliovirus genome was published by two different teams of researchers: by Vincent Racaniello and David Baltimore at MITand by Naomi Kitamura and Eckard Wimmer at Stony Brook University. Poliovirus is one of the most well-characterized viruses, and has become a useful model system for understanding the biology of RNA viruses.
This disease usually effects children below age 5, 20 years ago thousands of children effected everyday around the world. over the course of 20 years, 20 million volunteers reached the 500 million people every year. Now polio cases have reduced by 99%. the goal is to make the world polio free.