How safe is America from polio?

When 13-year-old music prodigy Itzhak Perlman performed on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1958, viewers could see his extraordinary talent. What they couldn't see were the braces and crutches he needed to walk.  In:

When 13-year-old music prodigy Itzhak Perlman performed on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1958, viewers could see his extraordinary talent. What they couldn't see were the braces and crutches he needed to walk. 

Perlman was four when he contracted polio. "I was already running and walking, and I remember one morning when I got up and I couldn't stand," he said. "I usually would stand up in the bed. And then I would go out and get dressed and so on. All of a sudden it was like, Stop. Can't do that anymore."

Perlman, like hundreds of thousands of other children around the world, was infected by the polio virus before the first vaccine against the disease became available in 1955. He missed the vaccine by about six years. "Yeah, I'm here to tell you that's what happens when you're not vaccinated," Perlman said. "My life was changed forever. My parents were upset. Ugh, they were so upset."

The polio virus could cause paralysis so severe, some children needed machines to breathe. At the height of the pandemic, in the late 1940s and early '50s, thousands of children were kept alive by iron lungs.

"There was no protection, and there was no cure," said historian David Oshinsky, a professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winner "Polio: An American Story." "You could be a hands-on parent, a hands-off parent. It didn't matter. You could not protect your child from polio."