When you're battling a virus that's not named Ebola these days, it takes a little more effort to get people's attention.

So Tim Mulcrone pulled out the big guns at a recent speech in Bloomington to convince fellow Rotarians to stay vigilant in their club's long, historic fight against polio.

Mulcrone dressed up as Dracula and spoke as one evil villain about another evil villain — one he said was capable of deforming and twisting limbs. "Polio is like this living, breathing bad guy," said Mulcrone, the polio eradication chairman for Rotary Club's District 5950 in Minnesota.

Hammy? Sure. But you have to admire Rotary's commitment to eradicating polio.

Long before anyone heard of Ebola, the word polio struck terror in the hearts of parents. In 1952 alone the virus killed more than 3,100 Americans — mostly infants and school-aged children — and left more than 21,000 with mild to severe paralysis.

"It was the Ebola of its time," Mulcrone said.

A vaccine for highly contagious poliomyelitis was invented in 1954, but polio was still afflicting 1,000 people a day around the globe in the mid-1980s.

That's when the Rotary organization brought global partners together and expanded distribution of the vaccine. Since then, the annual number of cases has plummeted from 350,000 to about 250.

In the past decade Minnesota has reported only one case — a rare infection that can occur when triggered by the vaccine, which carries a weakened form of the actual poliovirus.

Minnesota also made national news a decade ago this month when four unvaccinated children in an Amish community near St. Cloud suffered polio infections.

And globally, there have been signs of a comeback. The World Health Organization raised alarms of an international spread of the virus earlier this year because of cases in Cameroon.

Which is why a retired police officer like Mulcrone was willing to don a cape and speak in his best Dracula voice. "We have to actually continue," he said, "to the point of full annihilation of the virus."