Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a serious infectious disease caused by a virus that affects the central nervous system. Polio, sometimes called infantile paralysis, primarily affects children. When the virus first takes hold, symptoms begin with body aches and a stiff neck. As the disease progresses, it affects nerve tissue causing paralysis and the wasting of muscle tissue. Before inoculation was available, polio was a dread disease that killed many, because paralysis of the breathing muscles caused suffocation. Today, due to immunization programs and the World Health Organization's Global Technical Consultative Group on Polio Eradication program, a total of only 4,116 polio cases were reported worldwide in 1997, a decline of 90 percent worldwide since the program began in the late 1980s. With the disease still widely found in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, South Asia, the Congo, Nigeria, West and Central Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa, WHO is...