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Disease has a deadly history

ELKINS — Before the mid-to-late 1950s, late summer was dubbed “polio season.” When the weather warmed up each year, panic over polio intensified. Public swimming pools shut down and insurance companies started selling polio insurance for newborns.

In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died. Hospitals set up special units with iron lung machines to keep polio victims alive, according to an article on NPR.org. Rich kids as well as poor were left paralyzed.

Acute polio or poliomyelitis has been around since antiquity. An Egyptian wall plaque from the period 1580-1350 BC depicts a young man with a withered leg, leaning on a staff. The term poliomyelitis derives from two Greek words, polios, meaning grey, and myelos, or matter, and refers to the grey matter of the spinal cord. The disease has many names, including infantile paralysis.

According to Post-Polio Health International, the first attempt at a clinical description of the disease appeared in 1789, while the first reported outbreak was of four cases in Worksop, England, in 1835 and the first systematic investigation of poliomyelitis was written in Germany in 1840.

The puzzling aspect of polio was its transformation at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century from a comparatively rare endemic disease into an epidemic disease in the world’s most advanced societies, particularly in Scandinavia and the United States.

Epidemics exploded in Stockholm in 1887, in Vermont in the U.S. in 1894, and in Sweden again in 1905 and 1911. Then, in the United States in New York, the 1916 epidemic killed 6,000 and maimed 27,000, mostly children.

In 1905, Dr. Ivar Wickman of Stockholm recognized the contagious nature of polio and in 1908, in Vienna, it was discovered that the infectious agent was a virus.

It was not until World War II that is was discovered that humans could “live” with polio and not be killed by it. A U. S. Army virus commission operating in North Africa found that in countries where polio was endemic, people acquired immunity in infancy by having a mild form of the disease. By contrast, in countries where developments in hygiene and sanitation had reduced the occurrence of contagious diseases, people no longer acquired immunity naturally in infancy and become vulnerable to the virus when it circulated; thus the periodic epidemics.

It was the four-time elected U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt who facilitated the search for a vaccine. He contracted the disease at the advanced age of 39 in 1921, 12 years before his first presidency. His presidency put polio front and center on a national stage and in 1938, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was founded and spearheaded the March of Dimes for polio research and a development of a vaccine. By the time of his death in 1945, the National Foundation was a powerful voluntary health organization, funding research into polio in the United States.

Jonas E. Salk was the first to take advantage of a 1948 breakthrough that proved that poliovirus could be cultivated in non-nervous tissue. Salk’s formalin-inactivated poliovirus vaccine was subjected to the most extensive trial in the history of medicine.

On April 26, 1954, 6-year-old Randy Kerr was injected with the Salk vaccine at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia, and by the end of June, an unprecedented 1.8 million people, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, joined him in becoming “polio pioneers.”

Albert B. Sabin’s live, attenuated oral poliovirus vaccine ousted Salk’s IPV as the vaccine of choice in the early 1960s. It became available in 1962, and quickly supplanted Salk’s injected vaccine because it was cheaper to produce and easier to administer.

By this time it had been determined that the virus entered the environment in the feces of someone infected, and in areas of poor sanitation, the virus easily spread into the water supply, or by touch, into food. The OPV followed the oral-fecal route and could provide “herd immunity.”

In 1979 the United States was deemed polio-free.

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