How many people used to be disabled by polio compared to now

The number of people disabled by polio in the past is not directly comparable to the present because the disease has been eliminated in most of the world, but the legacy of disability remains large.

The retrieved evidence does not contain a single global or national count of people disabled by polio in the past. It focuses on the present-day challenges of polio survivors. One review notes there are tens of millions of polio survivors worldwide, with about 1.6 million in the United States alone [1]. These are people who contracted polio decades ago and now live with late effects.

Today, wild poliovirus has been eliminated from most countries. In Turkey, for example, no wild poliovirus has been detected since 1998 [3]. The current burden of polio-related disability is almost entirely from people who were infected before eradication, not from new cases. A 2024 study of 200 polio survivors in Pakistan found that 91.5% reported aggravated complications like pain and fatigue, and 64.5% reported new health problems [2]. A 2025 review of polio survivors in Korea found that 68.5% had fallen in the past year, and 78% had difficulty with daily activities like walking [1].

The question cannot be answered with a single "then vs. now" number from this evidence. The past burden was measured in annual cases of paralysis, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands globally before vaccines. The current burden is measured in the millions of aging survivors who live with post-polio syndrome. The comparison is between a historical rate of new paralysis and a present-day population of people with lasting disability.

My call: the evidence does not provide a direct numerical comparison of past and present disability counts. The past burden was defined by new paralytic cases; the present burden is defined by the millions of survivors aging with disability. Confidence: low for a precise comparison, moderate for the general trend.