Polio Almost Eradicated

"Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio.” – 1950s

Polio is another ancient disease that has been known since prehistory; Egyptian paintings show healthy people with withered limbs and children walking with canes. The disease was once called infantile paralysis, based on its propensity to affect children. While now rare in the Western world, polio is still endemic to South Asia and Nigeria. In 1988 a global effort to eradicate polio was begun by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and The Rotary Foundation. These efforts have reduced the number of diagnosed cases by 99%; from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 1006 cases in 2009.

Curiously occurrences of polio spiked in the early 20th century to epidemic proportions. The cause: modern sanitation and an odd trait of polio. The disease is bacterial and spread by the “fecal-oral” method which is as awful as it sounds. Persons shit out the disease, which contaminates waters or food, which is then consumed. But what happens next depends upon the age of the victim. The effects of polio are worse the older you are when you contract it. A child might develop a deformed limb while an adult loses the ability to breathe and needs an iron lung. Infants under six months can beat the disease and become immune for life. With modern sanitation providing clean water and food, infants were no longer exposed to polio on a regular basis. Instead the first exposure was occurring later in life with more serious results.

In the United States the polio epidemic began around 1900 and peaked in 1952 with 58,000 cases reported, 3,145 deaths, and 21,269 left with mild to disabling paralysis. In 1977 there were 254,000 persons living in the United States who had been paralyzed by polio as a child. Future president FDR was infected in 1921 and paralyzed from the waist down. Later as President he created the March of Dimes Foundation to raise money to fight polio and a “great race” began to find a cure.

Today there is still no cure but on April 12, 1955 Jonas Salk completed field trials and presented to the world an inactive variant of polio that was 90% effective in immunizing individuals by teaching the body how to produce antibodies to fight a future polio infection. Salk was hailed as a "miracle worker", and the day "almost became a national holiday." Salk had developed a safe and effective vaccine as rapidly as possible, with no interest in personal profit. When he was asked in a televised interview who owned the patent to the vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Sadly Salk was not awarded the Nobel Prize. It went instead to others who learned how to grow the polio virus in embryonic tissue so that enough virus culture could be collected to be studied.

You might remember being given a sugar cube to fight polio in grade school. In 1955 Dr. Albert Sabin produced a live-virus vaccine that was placed on a sugar cube and eaten, rather than injected. This was far easier to distribute than Salk’s vaccine but made doctors nervous – could they be infecting persons with a weak constitution? Fortunately the Sabin vaccine was found to be (mostly) safe and by 1967 became the preferred method. Today the preferred method has switched back to injections as being safer.

Bottom Line

Support the effort to make polio the second disease to be eradicated from the Earth. Inoculate your children. Until the disease is 100% dead it is not safe to skip the shot. An infected immigrant could give your child paralysis for life with a contaminated hot dog or other prepared food.

In the early 1900's Typhoid Mary (Mary Mallon) infected 53 people as a cook. She was a healthy carrier of typhoid fever who refused to recognize her own role in spreading the disease and who refused to cease working as a cook. She was forcibly quarantined twice by public health authorities and died in quarantine after 23 years of confinement.