A multi-year effort to find a vaccine and treatment for a much-feared disease is the subject of today’s #stampoftheday, which was issued on June 15, 1957.

The disease was polio, a virus that paralyzes muscles and destroys nerve cells that was common in the US during the first half of the 20th century. The first major polio epidemic in the United States hit Vermont in 1894 with 132 cases. A larger outbreak struck New York City in 1916, with more than 27,000 cases and 6,000 deaths.

Over the subsequent decades, fear of outbreaks was high. As the weather warmed up each year, panic over polio intensified. Late summer was dubbed “polio season.” Public swimming pools were shut down. Movie theaters urged patrons not to sit too close together to avoid spreading the disease. Insurance companies started selling polio insurance for newborns. And whoever was able to do so would leave the city. My mother, for example, told stories of how even at the height of the Great Depression her parents and extended family would scrape together money that allowed her mother to take all the children out of the Bronx to someplace more remote in the summer usually a farm in the Catskills. (She also said that her sister Millie, who hated the country, always cried when they had to leave the city, while my mother, who loved the country, said she always cried when it was time to return.)

Despite such cautions, polio was still common in the early 1950s. In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died. Hospitals set up special units with iron lung machines to keep polio victims alive.

Finally, in 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk developed a vaccine to prevent polio that began to be used widely. In 1957 – the same year this stamp was issued – an oral vaccine was developed by Dr. Albert Sabin was developed. (I remember lining up in Summit to get the oral vaccine in about 1963.)

By 1979, the virus had been completely eliminated across the United States and by the early 2000s, it was on the verge of being eliminated from the world. In fact as late as 2012, the virus was endemic in only two parts of the globe: northern Nigeria and the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The eradication of polio is one of the great success stories of modern medicine. And that success gives me hope. But, in light of today’s situation, it’s also sobering to recall how long it took, not only how long it took to develop a vaccine but also how long it took to actually vaccinate most people and even after that how long it took from development to eradication of a terrible disease.

Hopefully we’ll do it faster this time. But we should be prepared to be at this for much longer than we want.

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.