The Iowa Polio Stories Oral History Project

Polio will soon be history.

When the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988, there were more than 350 000 cases a year in more than 125 countries. In 2003, there were just 784 cases. This year will be critical for the initiative led by WHO, Rotary International, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF. If vaccination campaigns can immunize all children in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and ...

Age and Developmental History of Iowa Fens

Assessing the stability of polio eradication after the withdrawal of oral polio vaccine

A fundamental complexity of polio eradication is that the elimination of wild poliovirus (WPV) alters the risk-benefit profile of using oral polio vaccine (OPV)—as WPV is eliminated, OPV produces an increasing proportion of the paralytic disease burden since, in rare instances, OPV causes paralysis in vaccine recipients and generates circulating vaccine-derived polio outbreaks (cVDPV) in under-...

Molecular analyses of oral polio vaccine samples.

It has been suggested that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and thus the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) it causes, was inadvertently introduced to humans by the use of an oral polio vaccine (OPV) during a vaccination campaign launched by the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, PA, USA, in the Belgian Congo in 1958 and 1959. The "OPV/AIDS hypothesis" suggests that the OPV used in t...

Children and elders sharing stories: lessons from two online oral history projects

Oral history projects provide a way for students to learn history by engaging with elders sharing stories relevant to their experience. However, these kinds of projects require a large amount of effort to undertake. We believe computing technology can help. Here, we examine the role of existing technology in allowing kids and elders to share historical stories. We present the results of two pil...