A few classes ago we were asked to select a virus and research it; I chose polio and the following is what I learned.

Polio also known as poliomyelitis is an extremely contagious virus that is most prominent in 3rd world countries and regions without easy access to medicine. It is a ssRNA virus that replicates through the lysogenic cycle . The virus attaches primarily to motor neurons where it is taken up into the nerve cell through endocytosis. It uses the cell’s ribosomes to produce more viral DNA until the cell lyses and the viral particles are released back into the blood stream to find other cells to infect. Polio was an extremely prominent problem up through the 1900’s but recently the numbers of cases have fallen dramatically and even India, which used to have one of the largest Polio problems, has declared itself polio-free.

So that’s all I have on Polio. If anybody knows anything else let me know, I’d love to know more about it!