[6] It runs a telephone and e-mail answer-line during business hours, responding to requests from polio survivors, clinicians, researchers, and journalists.
Its websites are updated almost every business day, and have a searchable archive of information on polio, post-polio syndrome, and independent living.
PHI’s core constituency is in North America, but its networks of polio survivors, clinicians, scientists, and historians have always been widely international.
Its many publications such as its Handbook,[11] its two quarterly newsletters, its informational brochures on the late effects of poliomyelitis (published in Chinese, Persian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish), and its occasional formal statements on controversial issues such as physical exercise and on anesthesia for people with neuromuscular disabilities are widely referenced.
Polio survivors (substantially more in 1960 than the CDC-estimated one million in the US who were still alive in 1995)[13] were often isolated from the support needed to cope with maturing and aging with a significant physical disability.
These efforts evolved into a variety of publications aimed at providing authoritative information on health issues for polio survivors, and on mainstream opportunities for them – as well as for other people with significant physical disabilities – in education, employment, family life, travel, and leisure activities.
Accessibility (of public places, education, governmental institutions, and of transportation and accommodations) was a major theme, as was the development of an effective system of home health care and personal attendants to ensure that people with serious physical disabilities would be able to live in the community of adults rather than as perpetual dependents within families or institutions.
In concert with clinicians, researchers, and polio survivors, PHI began to publish material on these “late effects of poliomyelitis,”.