Polio and Me

The year is 1943. A five year old boy wakes up. He cannot stand or hold an apple in his hand. The boy is rushed to his family doctor, diagnosed with polio, and taken from his mother’s arms to the contagion ward at the county hospital. Despite decades of futile research, polio epidemics continued to paralyze and kill hundreds of thousands od adults and children well into the 1950s. Polio and Me provides a view of the past, present, and future-the saga of one boy’s pain, fear, and loneliness-the long struggle to find a vaccine and effective treatments-the worldwide goal to eradicate the polio virus, and in one twenty-first century cancer research trial, the polio vaccine eliminated cancerous tumors.