How many cases of polio have been recorded since 1952?

Question

I just need some numbers, any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

About 8 cases of polio are reported yearly in the United States.

Answer 2

Though apparently no study was ever conducted to examine the long-term effectiveness of the Salk vaccine, the statistics dramatically illustrate at least its short term success. From pre-vaccine highs of about 58,000 cases in 1952 and 35,000 cases in 1953, the rate dropped to about 5600 cases in 1957, the first year after the vaccine was widely available (Jones, 1993).

By 1962, the Salk vaccine was replaced by the Sabin oral vaccine. The effectiveness of this new vaccine had been demonstrated in field trials conducted in 1958 and 1959. Using live, attenuated (weakened) virus, the oral vaccine was not only superior in terms of ease of administration, but also provided longer lasting immunization (Nathanson, 1982).

With the Salk and later the Sabin vaccines providing a one-two punch, polio was down and out for the count, at least in the United States. In 1964, only 121 cases were reported nationally. Currently, there are typically fewer than ten new cases per year, but none originates from native, "wild" polio virus. Rather, these cases are either vaccine related or "imported." (Nathanson, 1982).

There were still about 100,000 cases of polio worldwide in 1993 (Keegan, 1994), primarily in Asia and Africa. Although there had not been a case of polio due to" native wild polio virus" in the entire western hemisphere since 1991 (Report, 1993), a recent outbreak in Haiti and the Dominican Republic shows the need for continued vaccination efforts, even in apparently "polio-free" areas (PAHO, 2001). The Global Polio Eradication Initiative had set a goal to completely eradicate polio worldwide by the year 2000, but wars, natural disasters, and poverty in about 30 Asian and African nations have prevented this goal from being completely achieved. The new target date for worldwide polio eradication is now 2005 (Orfinger, 2000).

Polio's legacy will remain, however. In 1977, the National Health Interview Survey reported that there were 254,000 persons living in the United States who had been paralyzed by polio (Frick and Bruno, 1986), and the total number of polio survivors in this country may still exceed 600,000. The number world-wide is probably more than ten million, many of whom must be experiencing polio's late effects.

Polio in the United States was eradicated in the late 1970s and the World Health Organization launched a drive in 1988 to do it globally through massive immunization efforts. Those efforts have reduced the number of cases from 350,000 a year in 1988 to 1,267 cases last year.