Brief history of poliomyelitis and its virtual eradication through vaccination.

Poliomelitis is a condition known to humanity for more than two millennia. In the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, epidemic outbreaks occurred on all continents, causing high mortality and important neuromuscular sequelae among those who survived.

The development of vaccines by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin in the mid-20th century changed the landscape substantially. Starting in 1988, the WHO launched a mass vaccination campaign whose results have allowed the virtual eradication of this serious disease, although a few cases continue to occur in Afghanistan and Pakistan.