Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 22, 2008

Poliomyelitis is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route. Although around 90% of polio infections have no symptoms at all, affected individuals can exhibit a range of symptoms if the virus enters the blood stream. In fewer than 1% of cases the virus enters the central nervous system, preferentially infecting and destroying motor neurons, leading to muscle weakness and acute flaccid paralysis. Spinal polio is the most common form, characterized by asymmetric paralysis that most often involves the legs. Poliomyelitis was first recognized as a distinct condition by Jakob Heine in 1840. Its causative agent, poliovirus, was identified in 1908 by Karl Landsteiner. Polio had existed for thousands of years quietly as an endemic pathogen until the 1880s, when major epidemics began to occur in Europe; soon after, widespread epidemics appeared in the United States. These epidemics—which left thousands of children and adults paralyzed—provided the impetus for a "Great Race" towards the development of a vaccine. The polio vaccines developed by Jonas Salk in 1952 and Albert Sabin in 1962 are credited with reducing the annual number of polio cases from many hundreds of thousands to around a thousand. Enhanced vaccination efforts led by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and Rotary International could result in global eradication of the disease. (more...)

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