Polio Symptoms

Screening and diagnosis
... Doctors can often recognize polio by symptoms such as neck and back stiffness, abnormal reflexes and difficulty swallowing and breathing. To confirm the diagnosis, a sample of throat secretions, stool...

Signs and symptoms
... Despite polio''s ability to cause paralysis and death, the vast majority of people who contract the virus don''t become sick and are never aware they''ve been infected. Yet even without any sign of il...

Polio Prevention

Prevention
... Although improved sanitation on the public level and fastidious hygiene on the personal may help reduce the spread of polio, the only real way to prevent the disease is with the polio vaccine. However...

Polio Treatment

Complications
... Paralytic polio can lead to temporary or permanent muscle paralysis, disability and deformities of the hips, ankles and feet. Although many deformities can be corrected with surgery and physical thera...

Treatment
... In 1916, a large polio outbreak in the United States — and ineffectual efforts to contain it — spurred researchers to find new and better treatments for the disease. What resulted were two...

Polio Other

Overview
... Eight years before the Great Depression and two decades before the United States entered World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt''s mettle was tested by another crisis. In 1921, the future president l...

Post-Polio Syndrome Information Page
... Post-Polio Syndrome (PPS) is a condition that can strike polio survivors anywhere from 10 to 40 years after their recovery from polio. PPS is caused by the death of individual nerve terminals in the m...