PRESENTED BY: Asakiran Nadikatla
PRESENTED TO: Gerard Cleaves
Polio an American story is a scholarly readable and informative book which covers the lives of many American eminent scientists who struggled a lot to eradicate polio. This book mainly focuses on the mid twentieth century where the people are very eager to find a vaccine to eradicate polio .This book also covers the entire topics from appearance of polio symptoms to post polio syndrome which shows the valuable thesis done by David M. Oshinsky.
Throughout this book he has mined the personal lives of Albert Sabin, Jonas Salk, Thomas Francis who contributed or struggled hard to eradicate a serious dreadful disease like polio. He also relates the mysterious rise of poliomyelitis to the response of public, media, press and government. He also described very clearly about the lives of eminent scientists like Sabin, Jonas Salk, Basil who contributed a lot in understanding and control of polio. He also included some tragedic events like administration of inactivated experimental polio vaccine to the children in the 19th century resulted in paralyzing hundreds of vaccine recipients, to administering the inactivated polio vaccine to oral polio vaccine is very well documented and presented.He also describes Franklin Delano Roosevelt struggle with his limb paresis, Roosevelt one time law partner who was the founder of National foundation of infant paralysis, He has shown how Roosvelt suffered from this serious disease at his early age and also clearly explained each event in FDR and also mentioned about how the warmth of water high mineral content like calcium magnesium helped for recovery of this disease, and also shown how he helped the other people suffering from polio.
In the initial chapters he has shown the meaning and origin of the disease name, symptoms and