But was it?  Forty years later the survivors who had contracted the disease were experiencing a new set of symptoms that brought back the horrors of the earlier years.  Thousands of polio survivors live in Alberta.  They are working, raising families, and contributing to their communities.  For many, it has been thirty to sixty years since they endured polio and the subsequent rehabilitation. Slowly but surely, physicians in Canada and the United States put together research and determined that Polio had not returned but that the residual effects of the original disease had begun to manifest themselves in previously unknown ways.  A new phrase entered into the lives of the survivors and the medical community, Post Polio Syndrome.

Although the majority of the patients that attend the Clinic are from Edmonton and Northern Alberta, there are many that come from Southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, because it is the only facility of its kind in Western Canada.  It is the intention of this group, that accessibility remains because of the uniqueness of the service.  Polio has not been conquered throughout the world.  Cases still occur  in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The World Health Organization has had to extend its target date for total immunization by two years and that is still being generous.  It is hoped that the work that this Clinic does, and the techniques that are developed here and other facilities in North America, can be used to aid the survivors in the rest of the World to adapt to their change in condition and assist them in maintaining as productive a lifestyle as is in their power. The Rotary Club takes donations for Polio that are forwarded directly to the cause. A vaccination for a child costs $0.50. Just as the experimental treatments on North American survivors, at the outset of Polio, have been used in these areas, so shall the treatments that we are now learning be used long after we are gone.