It's a disease that used to leave parents around the world overcome with fear.<br/> <br />Would their child get polio, leaving them irreversibly paralyzed within hours?<br/> <br />It's something famed violinist Itzhak Perlman knows all too well.<br/> <br />He got polio when he was just four-years-old and living in Israel.<br/> <br />(SOUNDBITE) (English) VIOLINIST AND POLIO SURVIVOR ITZHAK PERLMAN, SAYING:<br/> <br />"First symptoms were weakness in the lower limbs, and then goodbye (laughs), and then couldn't move anymore - at least couldn't walk anymore. That was that. It was kind of like a gradual - it wasn't even gradual - it was pretty sudden. It was - one day I could walk, the next day I couldn't."<br/> <br />Even U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered from it -- seen here in rare footage walking at the 1937 World Series.<br/> <br />Then came the vaccine.<br/> <br />NATS 1956 film: "Randy is the first child to get injected with the Salk polio vaccine...in the field trials in 1954"<br/> <br />Today, most countries are
