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In 1953 polio vaccine was introduced, and now, fifty years later, thanks to the vaccine, it's almost been eradicated. Fifty years ago, something momentous occurred. An American researcher called Jonas Salk published a paper announcing he'd developed an effective vaccine against polio. It's hard to overestimate the impact of what became known as the Salk vaccine. In 1953, Australia had just come through its worst-ever polio epidemic; at its peak about 10,000 people a year - mostly children and teenagers - were coming down with polio. And there was no treatment for this virus which caused paralysis by targeting those nerve cells in the spine which control muscles. Australia started using the vaccine two or three years later and by the end of the 1950s, we'd almost eliminated the disease. The Salk vaccine isn't given today because one of his colleagues, Albert Sabin, came up with a better, cheaper immunisation using a live form of the virus given by mouth. But nonetheless Salk's needle saved millions. And now, only 50 years after the first vaccine, polio is on the verge of being completely eliminated from the world. That'll be only the second time in human history that an infectious disease has been eradicated - smallpox was the first.
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