How U.S. and Soviet scientists fought polio during the Cold War Getty Images; Lev Porter/TASS “Epidemics have a way of spontaneously running out of steam,” veteran novelist Philip Roth wisely remarked in his last novel ‘Nemesis’, set during a polio epidemic in the United States. In the middle of the last century, polio was the number one killer of children across the globe. It was an incurable disease, until a vaccine was finally co-developed by the United States and USSR.
Poliomyelitis (polio) is actually as old as the hills. An Egyptian stone engraving dating from around 1403-1365 BC captures a crippled young priest with severe foot deformities indicative of polio. Human populations experienced the disease at various epochs. It wasn’t until 1908 that Austrian physicians Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper came to the conclusion that polio was in fact a viral infection. It’s also believed that industrial and social revolutions heavily contributed to t