Vaccination eliminated polio from the United States

Polio is an infectious disease that primarily impacts children, and can cause paralysis and even death. In the first half of the twentieth century, thousands to tens of thousands of people suffered from paralysis from this terrible disease every year.

The first injectable vaccine against polio was introduced in the United States in 1955. Six years later, a second vaccine was introduced, which could be taken orally.

By 1961, over 85% of US children under ten had received at least one vaccination against polio.

As a result, the last wild polio outbreak in the US occurred in 1979, and the disease was officially eliminated from North, Central, and South America in 1994. This means it was not spreading within this region, and any new cases were only seen among individuals infected elsewhere.

Read our colleague Max’s article about the global fight against polio →

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “Vaccination eliminated polio from the United States” by Fiona Spooner, Saloni Dattani, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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