Andri White woke up in an iron lung. It was 1955, and the 7-year-old had just returned to London from a family vacation on England’s south coast, where, unbeknown to her, the poliovirus was lurking in the water. White soon fell ill with poliomyelitis, a life-threatening disease caused by the virus, and within weeks she was paralyzed. She’d spend much of the next two years hospitalized—and the next 70 fighting for the medical system to take seriously her litany of continuing side effects. Today there are roughly 12 million to 20 million polio survivors worldwide, including an estimated 50,000 in the UK. …