A Texan man dubbed “Polio Paul” aka Paul Alexander, 75, is one of the last people in the world who still has an iron lung. The ventilators, which were invented in the 1920s, lined hospital wards amid polio outbreaks that plagued the US until the second half of the last century. 

In 1959, 1,200 Americans relied on an iron lung to stay alive, but the machines gradually became less common after widespread distribution of the polio vaccine. In 1979, the US was declared polio-free, and by 2014, there were only 10 Americans left using an iron lung. Now, according to the Guardian, Alexander is one of just two US residents who remain reliant on an iron lung. Alexander contracted polio in 1952 when he was six years old. “I lost everything: the ability to move, my legs would not hold me up and then I couldn’t breathe,” he recalls in a video shared by Reuters. As a youngster, he became paralysed from the waist down and was rushed to hospital and placed in an iron lung.