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How did Ivar Wickman show that people without paralysis could spread poliovirus?
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polio
A health care worker giving a polio vaccine to a child in Katsina state, Nigeria, 2014.
During a 1905 polio epidemic in Sweden that involved 1,031 cases, Ivar Wickman observed and recognized that individuals suffering from nonparalytic forms of the disease were capable of spreading the poliovirus. This insight was a critical step in understanding the transmission of the virus, as it helped clarify that the disease could be spread by people who did not exhibit the characteristic paralysis associated with the infection.1