Anyone working on a computer yesterday and using the popular search engine, Google, saw an unusual graphic on the Google search home page.

From time to time, Google features a timely graphic as a substitute to the regular graphic spelling out the word Google. On Tuesday, the google search home page featured a graphic honoring the 100th birthday of Jonas Salk, with a cartoon drawing of children holding a sign saying, “Thank you, Dr. Salk.”

Given the hypercharged debate going on now in the U.S. over the Ebola virus, it’s hard to comprehend the poliovirus story — both before and after the development of Salk’s vaccine.

To date, there have been four cases of people with Ebola in the United States. A Liberan man who contracted the disease in Africa and died in a Texas hosptial is the only Ebola death in the United States.

In the 1950s, polio was a national health crisis. In 1952, about 60,000 children were infected, with thousands becoming paralyzed and 3,000 dying. Pictures from the era show children wearing leg braces, using crutches and in iron lung machines at hospitals being used to treat children.

Every summer, parents feared for their children’s health. To combat the spread of the disease, swimming pools were closed and people were told not to sit close to each other in movie theaters.

At the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Salk directed research that developed a dead-cell vaccine. Testing of the Salk vaccine involved the innoculation of nearly 2 million children.

Knowing that an earlier vaccine test by a different researcher proved inneffective and even caused the death of some volunteers, it’s worth thinking how Salk’s work would be received today. Would cable television news shows sensationalize the deaths of the earlier tests and the risks of trying Salk’s vaccine?

A few years later, another researcher, Dr. Albert Sabin, developed an oral vacine that became widely used a few years after Salk’s vacccine, which was administered in an innoculation.

Another comparison between Salk’s time and today has been made when considering the fact that Salk did not patent the polio vaccine. Today, a big pharmaceutical company would make sure the life-saving vaccine made billions of dollars in profits.

When asked who owned his vaccine, Salk replied, “The people.” No doubt, Salk believed in his humanitarian work. But his statment was legally true because his research was largely funded by 80 million, mostly small donations to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which later became the March of Dimes. So, in many ways, the vaccine truly did belong to the people.

It would be impossible to overstate the impact of Salk’s and Sabin’s vaccines on the lives of American families and children. In 1955, widespread polio vaccination began in the United States. Infections dropped dramaticaly, and by 1979, the disease was eliminated in the U.S.

Globally, polio has been nearly eradicated, with only two remaining hot spots — one in Africa and one on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Given today’s Ebola debate and the focus on public health and the risks of exposure to Ebloa, it’s worth thinking back to the 1950s and how America handled polio — from Salk’s development of the vaccine to the willingness of parents to subject their children to the double-blind test of the vaccine.

On the 100th anniversary of Salk’s birth, his story and the story of the defeat of polio is worth remembering and celebrating.