Last American polio survivor in an iron lung dies at 78

the day in 1953 when she knew she had polio.

“I got it on my fifth birthday. I woke up and it was sunny outside, and I started to sit up, and my neck was killing me,” she said. “I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow.”

That was two years before the vaccine was widely available in America. That year, 35,000 Americans got polio, and about half of them continue reading …