After three years without a single reported case of polio, India was declared free of polio. It’s been so long since polio was a epidemic in the United States &emdash;which goes a long to way to explaining our current anti-vaccination and anti-science culture&emdash; that is hard to grasp how monumental this news is for so many people. The BBC reports that there are only three countries left where polio is endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Wired recently had an excellent long-form piece on the effort to eradicate polio from the planet.
I had a friend (Brian Leveritt) who was my age and lived behind my house on Hazelwood in NLR, Ark., who in 1955 or 1956 had polio. Although he had the most life threating kind, it was the type most likely to not have disabling affects if you survived it and he luckily did.