I’ve written about polio several times before, but as one who was afflicted with this devastating disease in August 1955, I can’t express enough my horror that there is any conversation going on regarding limitation of the vaccine.
Poliomyelitis, a warm-weather virus especially targeting children, was the second-greatest fear in post-World War II America, after nuclear war. In the 1952 outbreak, 57,628 cases were reported, 3,145 died and 21,269 experienced paralysis.
Actually, the people I wish could be writing this column are my poor parents, who suddenly found all three of their children suffering from polio after a trip to the family homestead in Ohio to say goodbye to my dying grandfather.
There was a polio outbreak there at the time that they were unaware of. But even if they had been, the home was in a rural area well away from other homes. Nobody really knew for sure how polio was transmitted.
It is highly likely that we kids contracted it spending our days cooling off from the oppressive summer heat in the creek behind the house in Ohio. Sewage in that era fed into the creek, and (unknown at the time) polio is frequently caused by fecal contamination. My parents later learned there had been cases of polio upstream.
Upon return from that trip, all three of us became seriously ill, the dread polio diagnosis clinched by a painful spinal tap. There had been no cases of polio in our area, and wishing to keep it that way, the local board of health quickly quarantined us.
Probably we kids recovered better than our poor terrified parents. The little boy in the polio ward bed next to my sister’s was suddenly the next day in an “iron lung,” a behemoth prison of a ventilator of the era used when the polio had impacted the respiratory muscles, causing respiratory paralysis. My poor mother couldn’t stop crying.
If you look at photos from that time, you see whole rooms of people — particularly children — in iron lungs. Fortunately, the iron lung has long since been replaced with modern, non-invasive ventilators. But still, we’re talking ventilators.
Ironically, when we contracted polio in August 1955, it was four months after Jonas Salk’s triumphant announcement of a successful vaccine. But vaccinating a whole country is not a quick process, any more than it was for the COVID vaccine. The vast majority of Americans couldn’t line up fast enough to get the vaccine for their kids in the mid-1950s.
While polio particularly targeted children, others could contract the virus as well. When teenagers and young adults remained woefully undervaccinated, Elvis Presley agreed to be vaccinated on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956, after which vaccination rates in those age groups skyrocketed. Never underestimate a celebrity endorsement.
For a long time after our diagnosis, none of the neighbors wanted their kids to play at our house. As noted, it wasn’t clear at that time how polio was transmitted (even bananas and mosquitoes were suspect), and no one was taking any chances.
Vaccine naysayers aren’t new. Even in the early ’50s, the vaccine had a vocal opponent in the form of a cosmetics magnate, Duon H. Miller, who made his fortune on a first-ever cream shampoo called Vita-fluff. Mr. Miller was convinced the vaccine was dangerous, and more to the point, that polio could be prevented by avoiding soft-drink consumption. He wasn’t too keen on bleached flour either.
As far as Duon H. Miller was concerned, polio was not an infectious disease (it’s a highly contagious virus) but a state of malnutrition. Ironically, he wasn’t totally wrong about the perils of a high-sugar, refined-food diet. It just wasn’t applicable to polio.
There was no internet then, so he had to use the U.S. Postal Service to get the word out, ultimately getting shut down by the federal government. But he still railed against sugar, “processed bread” and even pasteurized milk for years to come. Is the “pasteurized milk” thing sounding familiar?
Not surprisingly, I can’t be civil to anti-vaxxers. Not even minimally polite. I think they are ignorant idiots.
I wish every parent who doesn’t vaccinate their child could travel back to the 1950s to see how children suffered from now-preventable diseases. I don’t mumps, measles, chicken pox and rubella being any picnic either.
No child should ever have polio again. The vaccine, exhaustively tested for safety, is 90-100% effective, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is not a coincidence that there have been no major polio outbreaks in this country since the advent of the vaccine.
So here’s a message from my parents who are screaming from their graves: Get your child vaccinated against polio! And everything else, too!
Inga’s looks at life appear regularly in the La Jolla Light. Reach her at [email protected]. ♦
