Wikipedia:VideoWiki/Polio

Definition
Polio, also called poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus.

Symptoms
Polio causes muscle weakness, resulting in an inability to move in roughly one half percent of people, who are infected with the virus.

Onset of symptoms
This can occur over a few hours, to a few days.

Areas of the body affected
The weakness most often involves the legs, but can also include the muscles of the head, neck, and diaphragm.

Risk of death
Many people fully recover, but there is a risk of death. About 2 to 5 percent of children, and 15 to 30 percent of adults die, if they develop muscle weakness.

Minor symptoms
Another 25 percent of people infected have minor symptoms such as fever, and a sore throat, that resolve in one to two weeks. Five percent have headache, neck stiffness, and pains in the arms and legs. About 70 percent of infections have no symptoms at all.

Post-polio syndrome
Years after recovery ,post-polio syndrome may occur with a slow development of muscle weakness, similar to the persons original symptoms.

Spread
Poliovirus is usually spread from person to person through infected fecal matter entering the mouth, from food or water containing human feces, and less commonly from infected saliva.

Duration of infectiousness
Those who are infected may spread the disease for up to six weeks, even if no symptoms are present.

Diagnosis
The disease may be diagnosed by finding the virus in the feces, or detecting antibodies against it in the blood. The disease only occurs naturally in humans.

Prevention
Polio is preventable with the polio vaccine; however, multiple doses are required for it to be effective.

Vaccine boosters
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends polio vaccination boosters for travelers, and those who live in countries where the disease is occurring.

Treatment and current cases
Once infected there is no specific treatment. In 2018, there were 33 cases of wild polio, and 103 cases of vaccine-derived polio. This is down from 350,000 wild cases in 1988. In 2018, the disease was only spread between people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

History
Poliomyelitis has existed for thousands of years, with depictions of the disease in ancient art. The disease was first recognized as a distinct condition by the English physician Michael Underwood in 1789, and the virus that causes it was first identified in 1908 by the Austrian immunologist Karl Landsteiner.

History of endemic polio
Major outbreaks started to occur in the late 19th century, in Europe and the United States. In the 20th century it became one of the most worrying childhood diseases in these areas.

History of the polio vaccine
The first polio vaccine was developed in the 1950s by Jonas Salk. In 2013, the World Health Organization hoped that vaccination efforts, and early detection of cases would result in global eradication of the disease by 2018.