Yesterday the WHO announced that polio had been eradicated in India. This is a further victory in the fight against the inflammation of the grey material of the spinal cord that became one of the most feared diseases of the twentieth century. The result was often paralysis. In the United States the worst attack was in 1952, when almost 58,000 cases were reported. Of this number, more than 3,000 people died and more than 20,000 had mild to disabling paralysis. Polio survivors include Mia Farrow, Arthur C. Clarke, Neil Young and Robert McNamara. Vaccines were discovered only in the 1950s and deployed at the end of the decade. The Americas were declared polio free in 1994, with Europe following in 2002. As of 2014, India is also off the list and the disease is close to being completely eradicated, with less than 300 new cases being reported globally in 2012.
But what are the origins of the word poliomyelitis? It has been put together from the Greek words polios (grey) and melios (marrow) plus the -itis addition meaning disease. As a word, poliomyelitis was first used as a word in German by A. Frey in a journal of clinical medicine published in Berlin in 1874. In this paper he writes about “a case of sub-acute paralysis among adults, probably poliomyelitis”. The first use in English was very similar, both in terms of publication and description: Four years later, an article in the American Journal of Medical Science states “The case was one of acute polio-myelitis”. And it was in American newspapers that the word polio originated. The first printed reference was in a newspaper in 1911.
