Registered nurse Starr Roden, left, administers a vaccination to a child at a clinic in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Associated Press File Photo

Paul Vernon

Do you or anyone you know have polio? If you live in the United States, or the vast majority of the world for that matter, chances are extremely slim.

That wasn’t always the case. While polio had existed since prehistory, large-scale outbreaks were uncommon until the early 20th century, when they started to appear, largely in Europe at first but, later in other parts of the world, including the U.S.

By the 1950s, late summer was widely recognized in the U.S. as “polio season.” In 1952, nearly 60,000 children in the country were infected with the virus and more than 3,000 died. Many more were paralyzed by the disease. The disease had become so widespread by the mid-20th century, insurance companies sold polio insurance for newborns.

That all changed in 1955, working with the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Jonas Salk, after years of research, announced a working vaccine. What’s more, in a move that would be unheard-of today, Salk opted not to patent the vaccine. Instead, he essentially chose to give it to the world for free in an effort to protect as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.

A mass immunization campaign, using both Salk’s vaccine and one developed by Dr. Albert Sabin in 1961, ensued. By the 1970s, the U.S. recorded it’s last polio cases, which were contained to some isolated Amish communities. By the 1990s, the last cases of polio in the Western Hemisphere and Europe were reported. Today, only a couple hundred cases or less are reported each year worldwide in a handful of specific areas of Asia and Africa, mostly in regions where they either never vaccinated against the disease or once did and have stopped.

The campaign to eradicate polio isn’t the only success story.

Vaccines have eliminated or nearly eliminated a number of other often fatal diseases in the U.S., and in many cases globally. The list includes smallpox, rubella, Haemophilus Influenzae type B, whooping cough and measles just to name a few. These diseases previously killed or left lifelong ramifications to hundreds to thousands of people per year in the U.S. alone.

However, in recent years, an alarming trend has been growing in this country: A disbelief in the proven science of vaccines has led more and more people to choose not to vaccinate their children.

And we’re starting to see the effects of the movement, dubbed anti-vax, right here in the U.S., most visibly, in the form of measles. In 2000, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eliminated from the nation.

But due to growing anti-vax sentiment in recent years, this highly contagious disease has made a marked return — endangering babies, young children, pregnant women, adults over the age of 20 and people with weakened immune systems, according to the CDC. So far in 2025, there have been dozens of measles outbreaks and more than 1,000 confirmed cases of the disease across 40 states.

This is a recent trend. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s only a handful of cases per year were reported nationwide.

This month, in honor of National Immunization Awareness Month, let’s take some time to remember the success vaccination has had in our country and reflect on the dangers of those successes being reversed.

— JP