I'm a polio survivor and now leader of the Northwestern University Polio Clinic's support group.

We meet monthly, except during the winter, at Chicago's Rehabilitation Institute to address the many problems facing survivors of a disease that probably will be extinct in this country within 30 to 40 years.

The younger generations have no memories of the tens of thousands of children and adults stricken with poliomyelitis, or "polio," until a vaccine was discovered in the 1950s to end this nightmare.