As a child, I spent a lot of time with my mother’s cousin Dolly. I remember seeing childhood pictures of Dolly running through her yard. That was before she contracted the polio virus. Sadly, there was no polio vaccine for Dolly at the time. Dolly spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair and lived with disfigured hands.
My generation, and those after me, has been fortunate to be spared of many diseases due to the development of successful vaccines. Dolly was one of the many who suffered from debilitating diseases before effective vaccines were created. Unfortunately, polio and other horrific diseases still exist in the world today, and a number of them — even some considered eradicated in the U.S. — are returning among the unvaccinated at an alarming rate.
