Erwin Popper News Today

It has been more than 110 years since researchers determined that a virus causes polio and almost 70 years since vaccines began protecting from it.

Australian health authorities are on high alert after cases of a paralysis-causing virus were detected overseas.

London has logged 116 poloviruses from 19 sewage samples since February, with at least one positive sample in eight north east boroughs.

A call went out to British parents on Wednesday to check their polio jabs were up to date after the virus was detected in sewage and it emerged as few as a third of teens are vaccinated in some areas.

Polio, which scientists believe has been circulating since ancient Egypt, spread like other common bugs and viruses for millennia. But as hygiene improved in the 1800s, outbreaks took off.

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 US...