Last American polio survivor dependent on iron lung dies at 78

One individual died after decades of living with severe polio-induced paralysis requiring continuous iron lung support.

For more than seven decades, Paul Alexander breathed through a machine rather than his own lungs, a living artifact of the polio epidemics that once swept through American summers and paralyzed thousands of children each year. His death at seventy-eight, in a Dallas that had long since forgotten the fear of iron lungs, closes the last human chapter of a disease nearly erased from the earth by vaccination. He was not merely a survivor — he was a lawyer, a memoirist, and a warning: that the distance between eradication and resurgence is measured not in science, but in collective will.

Last American polio survivor dependent on iron lung dies at 78

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