Thanks to the Polio Vaccine, Nobody Builds Iron Lungs Anymore

This video is about one of the last Amer­i­cans to get polio. He got it right before the Salk vac­cine came out. For this rea­son, he is one of the last peo­ple to be using an “iron lung” ven­ti­la­tor. Since nobody makes these machines any­more, he had a lot of trou­ble in find­ing a mechan­ic to main­tain the machine. Also, nobody was mak­ing spare parts for the machine.

For­tu­nate­ly, a glob­al vac­ci­na­tion cam­paign is about to dri­ve polio into extinc­tion. After the polio virus­es are no longer cir­cu­lat­ing, we will no longer need to vac­ci­nate any­one against this dis­ease.

Rotary Inter­na­tion­al has played an impor­tant role in sup­port­ing the polio erad­i­ca­tion cam­paign. For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it: https://my.rotary.org/en/take-action/end-polio.