8 celebrities who had polio and described their experiences, from paralysis to having their belongings burned

Polio may seem like a disease of the past, but health officials have recently detected the virus in wastewater in New York City as well as Rockland County, New York.

The illness was eliminated from the US in 1979, a couple decades after the first vaccines were distributed to the population. Once a frightening disease with the potential to paralyze children, polio all but disappeared from the developed world due to the success of vaccination campaigns.

Nowadays, most children receive a 4-shot vaccination series to prevent against poliomyelitis, the disease caused by poliovirus. But many older people, including some famous faces, still remember the days before the disease could be avoided with a few shots.

Renowned artist Frida Kahlo contracted polio in 1913. She was 6 years old at the time and had to spend several months in bed recovering from the disease.

"It all began with a horrible pain in my right leg from the muscle downward," Kahlo remembered, according to a 2002 biography of the artist. "They washed my little leg in a small tub with walnut water and small hot towels."

Although she was not paralyzed like other polio sufferers, Kahlo's right leg was left noticeably shorter and thinner than her left one, and ulcers would plague her foot in the years that followed. However, historians believe that her leg troubles may have stemmed from a genetic disorder, and that the polio infection only worsened her condition.

Actress and activist Mia Farrow had polio at age 9. Her experience with the disease inspired her to work on polio vaccination campaigns around the world.

Farrow was one of some 500 people sickened in a polio outbreak in Los Angeles in the summer of 1954. In her memoir, What Falls Away, she wrote that she was taken to an isolation unit at Los Angeles General Hospital and kept away from her six siblings for months. All of her belongings were burned to prevent the spread of disease.

"I perhaps am more motivated than most people because I had polio myself and it was a real struggle to come through it," Farrow told the New York Post in 2000, speaking about a UNICEF campaign to eradicate the disease by 2005.

"What I saw will never leave me — in the hospitals and in the public wards for contagious diseases," she said.

Alan Alda, best known for playing surgeon Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce on M*A*S*H, was diagnosed with polio at age 7.

In an interview with AARP the Magazine, the actor recalled coming down with a stuffy nose one day, throwing up, and feeling unsteady in his legs. The next day, he had a stiff neck and could not sit up in bed.

He said he was hospitalized for two weeks and underwent six months of therapy, which involved having "nearly scalding" hot blankets wrapped around his limbs every hour.

"It was hard on me," he told the magazine. "It was harder, I think, on my parents, who couldn't afford a nurse and had to torture me themselves. It's always better to pay somebody to torture your kid."

Alda's M*A*S*H costar Donald Sutherland also was sick with polio as a child.

He told the Los Angeles Times that he also had rheumatic fever, hepatitis, appendicitis, pneumonia, and scarlet fever throughout his childhood.

Sutherland later told Esquire that his first word was "neck," much to his mother's surprise.

"My neck was killing me. That was a sign of polio," he said. "One leg's a little shorter, but I survived."

Joni Mitchell contracted polio as a child in the early 1950s and later saw a resurgence of her symptoms, she shared in 1995.

"I had polio at the age of 9," Mitchell told Star magazine. "My spine was twisted up like a train wreck. I couldn't walk. I was paralyzed. Forty years later, it comes back with a vengeance."

Mitchell was 51 when she started feeling "mind-numbing fatigue" and muscle weakness set in for the second time. Post-polio syndrome affects 25–40% of polio survivors decades after their initial illness, according to the CDC.

"I have to guard my energy," she said at the time. "Just like the bunnies in those battery commercials. I'm the one that's about to keel over. I'm not the one that's going and going."

At the age of 5, Neil Young contracted polio and was hospitalized at Toronto's Sick Children's Hospital in 1951, the singer wrote in his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace.

The Canadian singer-songwriter ultimately recovered from the disease, although he was left with a slight limp.

He received the polio vaccine when it rolled out about four years after his illness, and has since become a vocal advocate for vaccines.

"I was vaccinated for POLIO at my school in Canada. Nothing new about vaccines. They have been there for a long time. Like me! Trust Science," he wrote on his website.

Francis Ford Coppola had polio at age 9 and was paralyzed for about a year and a half, the New Hollywood director and screenwriter shared in 1988.

The award-winning filmmaker contracted polio in 1947 and spent a long time on bed rest, he told the New York Times.

''When you had polio then, nobody brought their friends around; I was kept in a room by myself, and I used to read and occupy myself with puppets and mechanical things and gadgets; we had a tape recorder, a TV set and things like that.''

Former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is perhaps one of the most famous Americans to have had polio. He was diagnosed with the disease in 1921, at the age of 39.

His diagnosis came as a surprise, since most cases of polio were diagnosed in infancy or childhood. Roosevelt recalled frequently falling ill as a child, so it's possible that he acquired the virus as a young boy and saw his immunity weaken later in life, according to the FDR Presidential Library.

FDR began experiencing lower back pain after a day of sailing on his yacht, and quickly felt his legs become weaker throughout the week. Soon, he could not support his own weight and required a wheelchair. However, he used swimming as a form of rehabilitation and eventually learned to walk with braces and a cane.