Today perhaps your only association with the word 'polio' is the Sabin Oral Vaccine that protects children from the disease. Fifty years ago this was not so . The dreaded disease, which mainly affects the brain and spinal cord. causing stiffening and weakening muscle, crippling and paralysis -which is why I am in a wheelchair today. If somebody had predicted, when I was born that this would happen to me, no one would have believed. I was the seventh child in a family of four pairs of brothers and sisters, with a huge 23 years gap between the first and last. I was so fair and brown-haired that I looked like a foreigner. I was also considered to be the healthiest of the brood.