Teri Mills, her husband, and their grandkids. Teri Mills

Teri Mills still vividly remembers the paper cups with the sugar cubes.

In the U.S. in the early 1960s, one way to administer the oral polio vaccine was dropping it onto sugar . Mills was one of the many children who queued up around her school for this sweet lifesaver. “My mom, I remember she wept with relief. And they could not line us up fast to get those vaccines,” Mills reminisces. “There was a lot of joy.”

It was joyful because the little sugar cubes offered protection against a life-altering, life-threatening disease. By the middle of the 20 th century, polio was paralyzing or killing half a million people a year. So the creation of a vaccine was a longed-for breakthrough. The effects of mass administration of polio

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