The clinical syndrome variously called benign myalgic encephalomyelitis, Iceland disease and epidemic neuromyasthenia

“Disease is very old and nothing about it has changed. It is we who change as we learn to recognise what was formerly imperceptible. ” J.M. Charcot Recent technical advances have added greatly to the ease with which virological methods may be applied to the study of poliomyelitis and allied infection of the central nervous system. These techniques have already borne abundant fruit in the development of a vaccine against poliomyelitis. The accurate appraisal of the preventive value of such a vaccine will depend on our ability to diagnose poliomyelitis accurately. It had long been believed that the clinical features of acute paralytic poliomyelitis were sufficiently characteristic for a confident diagnosis to be made on clinical grounds alone