A Vicious Epidemic Is Overcome by Vaccine
It was a parent’s worst nightmare. An epidemic whose primary target was children. A virus that seemed to come from nowhere, whose behavior was impossible to track. Health officials could give warnings, but their recommendations were so vague that they hardly served as safeguards. No going into the pool.
No playing outdoors.
Then a stiff neck, muscle cramps, a fever, perhaps a headache, and then, several days or a week later, your 4-year-old daughter wakes up and cannot lift her leg or her arm or the entire trunk of her body.
Between 1916, when the virus arrived in the United States with full force, and 1955, when Dr. Jonas Salk announced he had perfected a vaccine, polio crippled, and, in some cases, killed more than 1.5 million people. You did not have to be a child to acquire the disease, of course. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was 39 when he came down with polio in 1921. He never walked again on his own, although the American public would not know this until after he died.
My mother had just turned 29, having delivered her first child a month earlier, when she woke up one morning unable to move. The paralysis did not completely recede for nine months. By then, the muscles of her left leg and right arm, the two limbs most severely affected, had shriveled to the size of spaghetti.
Doctors told her that with rigorous physical therapy she would be able to regain the full use of either her right arm or her left leg, but not both.
A journalist, she chose her writing arm. For the rest of her life, she would need a cane to walk.
Thanks to Dr. Salk, my mother belonged to the last generation of polio patients, those struck down in the peak years of 1952 and 1953. When Salk announced his breakthrough April 12, 1955, it was more than front-page news. Factory whistles blew. Church bells rang.
President Dwight Eisenhower promised the discovery would be shared throughout the world, including, as the Associated Press story put it, “Russia and other Red countries.”
To borrow from historian Geoffrey C. Ward, a polio survivor, Salk did not just prevent a disease, he exorcised a ghost that had been haunting the world for more than 40 years. Because the three strains of the disease went unidentified for so long, polio generated a terror--a sense of dread that so permeated society that it became part of the air people breathed--for which AIDS provides the only modern equivalent.
Polio--like AIDS--became more than a disease, but a symbol of what was beyond science’s control. And as with AIDS, fear-mongering was common. Sharks, cats, Italian immigrants--all were accused, at one time or another, of carrying the disease to these shores.
Distribution of the Salk vaccine was so rapid that by 1961, the incidents of polio in the United States had dropped to less than a thousand. In 1960, Dr. Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine for polio that proved even more effective.
By 1995, the Pan American Health Organization declared that polio had been wiped out in the Western Hemisphere. The disease, though, still persists in the developing world. Approximately 100,000 new cases a year are reported, mostly in India and China; in some Third World countries the numbers are creeping upward.
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Salk’s victory heralded an extraordinary era of medical breakthroughs. During the next 40 years, vaccines would be created for a host of childhood diseases--mumps, rubella, chickenpox, whooping cough. The prevention of childhood diseases is now one of the principal standards by which societies measure their progress.
Despite all the breakthroughs, it turns out that polio had one more terrible surprise left. About 20 years ago, polio survivors began to report deterioration not just in their weak muscles but in their good ones; some began to experience difficulty breathing.
Over a period of five years, my mother went from using one cane, to two canes, to a walker, to a wheelchair. Doctors called the condition post-polio syndrome. About one-third of polio survivors have come down with it.
The syndrome appears to strike people 30 or 40 years after they first contracted the disease. It also seems to strike survivors who have led especially vigorous lives. So far, the cause remains a mystery.
The blow, of course, is as much psychological as it is physical: Having regained the use of their bodies, having every reason to believe the illness had been defeated, polio survivors face the prospect that they have to fight the battle all over again.
But this time the odds are not in their favor. This time, there is no Dr. Salk, no vaccine, no physical therapy on the horizon.
Fate, it seems, likes to play its cruel tricks more than once.
