Poliomyelitis also known as polio was an infectious disease caused by a virus that occupied the throat and intestinal tract. It was spread through person-to-person contact along with spread through the feces and sneezes of an infected person. Polio has affected humanity throughout history, attacking the nervous system and can cause varying degrees of paralysis. Polio was very common in the United States, causing serious illness in thousands of people each year. The disease has mostly affected infants and children, but some adults have also developed late cases of the virus. One of the greatest presidents of all time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was also struck by polio in 1921 and was paralyzed from the waist down. The creator of the vaccine was Dr. Jonas Salk. Dr. Salk was an accomplished scientist studying at the University of Pittsburgh and helped create flu vaccines during World War II. He didn't begin research on the polio vaccine until 1948 and only had an early version of the vaccine two years later. Salk was confident and believed in his vaccine so much that he used one of the first tests of the vaccine on himself and his family. On March 26, 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk successfully tested a polio vaccine. He stunned the world by announcing his vaccine on national CBS. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The polio vaccine was an amazing advance because of how quickly I worked. By April 1955, the vaccine was proven safe and began to spread nationwide, causing new cases of polio to drop to 6,000 in 1957, the first year after the vaccine was widely available. Comparing this number to that of just 5 years earlier, 58,000 new cases and 3,000 fatalities had been reported. The numbers continued to decline as polio cases dropped to >100 in the 1960s and >10 in the 1970s. Polio has been eradicated from the United States thanks to widespread polio vaccination in this country. Polio was declared eradicated in the United States in 1979, becoming the first virus ever to do so. Dr. Salk's decision not to get the polio vaccine saved millions of lives and stopped a widespread epidemic that was considered normal in the United States.