Poliomyelitis

For parents, few infections scored higher than poliomyelitis on the 'dread' factor from the early years of the twentieth century as each successive wave of the disease outdid its predecessor in the number of children it crippled and killed. But, from the 1950s, this picture abruptly changed when preventive vaccines were developed which have brought the disease to the edge of global eradication. Part I, Epidemic Emergence, 1881-1920, looks at the transitionfrom endemic to epidemic poliomyelitis in Europe and the United States. Part II, Global Expansion, 1921-55, covers the pre-vaccination period of epidemic poliomyelitis at world, continental and island scales. Part III, Global Retreat, 1955-88, focuses upon the control of poliomyelitis by mass vaccinationcampaigns. Part IV, Global Eradication, concludes the book by focusing upon the road to eradication, to which the Forty-first World Health Assembly committed in 1988.And so, at the beginning of a new millennium, poliomyelitis looks set to be the first disease since smallpox in 1979 to be eradicated by direct human intervention, with the interruption of wild poliovirus transmission expected in 2005. The evolution of poliomyelitis to global epidemiological significance from the 1920s marks it out as one of the world's major emergent infections of the twentieth century. What causes diseases to wax and wane in time and space is a theme of contemporaryscientific interest as we seek to understand the appearance of new conditions such as Ebola fever, Legionnaires' disease, and HIV, and this book contributes to our comprehension of likely causes.

Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew Cliff are Professors of Geography at Nottingham and Cambridge Universities. With Peter Haggett at the University of Bristol, they have led an interdisciplinary research group for over a quarter of a century which has worked upon the spatial diffusion of infectious diseases. Special focuses for the group have been reconstructing the processes by which diseases move from one geographical region to another, understanding the causes ofepidemic waxing and waning in time and space, and the demographic consequences of disease. Together, they have written twenty research monographs and 100 scientific papers on these topics.