Does anyone here remember the polio epidemics in the US?

Do you remember the public swimming pools pad-locked by order of the local health authority?

Do you remember the closed theaters that went out of business because people were afraid to congregate in public places?

Do you remember the terror on the faces of your family members when they learned that a child down the street had contracted polio?

Do you remember when the first day of school was a parent's worst nightmare because they did not know what dangers awaited their innocent child at a public school?

Do you remember the iron lungs and crutches and leg braces?

Do you remember the relief of getting that shot (later a sugar cube or piece of sponge cake with a drop of clear liquid on it)?

Do you remember the weight lifting off of your shoulders when you no longer had to fear everyone?

That was life in America until 1955.

A lot of people here seem to have forgotten that.

with braces on their legs. I started school in 63-64. So it must have been the tail end of it.

got for the vaccine. I remember going to the high school and standing in line with my dad holding me and getting the sugar cube. I remember not swimming in summer, the crutches and braces, the whole nine yards. I had a cousin with it. Now, those who learned to walk are having it return because the nerves that generated to replace those affected have worn out. :( The iron lung was the horror of horrors. Everyone was TERRIFIED of polio.

about being 'quarantined" at home for a month when the kid that sat next to her at school contracted it, I was born in '56 and even then the vaccine had not been perfected and had been found to in some case cause polio, Mom told me that she had afraid to and afraid not to, let the doctor give it me in the end she allowed it.

I imagine my parents were more than a little relieved that such a thing as polio vaccine existed.

We were all so young and stupid, we were a bit jealous because her parents put in a swimming pool for her to exercise in. We were all invited, but very few too the offer. Parents were all scared!

I remember getting the shot, and then prefering the sugar cube. I don't recall any sponge cake though.

There were things on the news all the time about the iron lung machines.

Very scary times folks!

I remember being warned away from street gutters as the source of polio. I remember when the first vaccines came out. I had shots and was so jealous when my brother got his first vaccination with a sugar cube. Two girls in my class in elemetry school had polio. I remember visiting a family friend who lived in an iron lung in her home. I don't remember theaters closing but I do remember the elation at the development of the Salk vaccine.

Ok. So now you know I was born before the 50's.

She died in a car accident when the Hartwell Georgia Reservoir was built. Some of the roads that were covered by Hartwell Lake, when they built the dam, were not properly blocked. She was out with her boyfriend and they ran into the lake. She could not get out of the car because of her braces and drowned. I remember sitting in her porch swing listening to the Muhammad Ali fights on the radio. Of course he was Cassius Clay back then. :dem:

I remember the salk vaccine, and how much relief there was.

I remember whooping cough, too....my mother had three kids, and the entire damn neighbourhood, including we three, came down with it at the same time.

I remember being banned from the rivers and lakes in August. I remember a bunch of stuff I wish I didn't!

Used to check the newspaper daily to see how many new cases were
reported. z

and August because some kids who used them had gotten it.

People have forgotten what too many diseases were like before we got immunizations.

Perhaps a trip through a New England graveyard should be mandatory: one man, three to five women in sequence, and dozens of tiny headstones for babies and children who died of all the things we now prevent.

...and class mates who had polio and one of my older sister's girl friends was a polio survivor

Even those of us who escaped the disease could not escape the environment of fear that it brought.

at the county seat, given the immunizations and then they took us to the theater for an hour of Looney Tunes. One school at a time, til the whole county was done. I was 6. So no I don't remember the epidemics but the potential was always there. Living in the country has some advantages, I suppose.

My college room mate had polio when she was 4 which was pre Salk, and she wore leg braces until she was 10.


That was the only immunization I didn't get from my regular doctor.
After that, the health department just came to the schools for the boosters.

Of course one time they trooped us all down to the cafeteria to get all injected up but it wasn't polio; it was typhoid, because somebody's well had tested for it or something. Anyway my doctor gave us typhoid imm every other year because we had a well. So I refused to take the shot because I had already HAD the shot and that mother makes you sick. I just refused, no crying or anything; it wasn't about the needle; I did not want to be sick again, twice in the same autumn!
So finally the teacher went up to the office and called my mom, mostly because I stood there and recited all the immunizations I had taken that year and stuff.
They did not make me take the shot

Even though I'd had the disease a few years earlier and was already immune, my mother was taking no chances. We were sent home with permission slips outlining risks and benefits and those of us whose parents signed them were lined up a week later and injected with the Salk vaccine.

She was in an iron lung for many months so I read to her and helped her with homework. I lost touch with her after we moved away but I do know that she died recently. She had six children and was a teacher.

Polio was gone by the time I was a kid, but I can still faintly see the scar on my upper left arm from my smallpox immunization.

Sid

Perhaps the anti-vaxites will show up to tell us why the polio vaccine is more dangerous than the disease.

that epidemics destroy communities, not just individuals. Those who weren't there seem to have forgotten so much about those times.

But it is the kind of fear that you can't forget after you have lived through it.

It was worse than the "duck and cover" fear.

It was worse than the "Cuban Missile Crisis" fear.

It was a pervasive fear that followed you every time you left your home to shop, to visit, or to play.

Fear is a terrible way to live whether you fear cervical cancer or the vaccine that helps to prevent it.

back in the days when there was an injectable vaccine.

Polio was long gone by the time I was born, but I've seen adults who lost limbs or had leg braces because of it. However they were few and far between - which is exactly what indirectly feeds the anti-vaccination hysteria. Thanks to the overwhelming, undeniable success of vaccines, those who fear modern medicine have no "Column B" to compare alleged vaccination reactions to. They assume all reported events are directly caused by the vaccine, and have no way of comprehending the horrors the vaccine prevented. Worse are those who believe we could to back to not vaccinating at all, just using quarantine and massive medical resources to fight those horrible diseases when they return. After all, their family member survived the first time around, so it can't be that bad, right? :sarcasm:

But there were still epidemics of measles when I was small. And German measles/ rubella was a serious risk for pregnant women - most parents of girls hoped their daughters *would* get this illness in childhood. I knew someone who was deaf from maternal rubella. By the time I was 13, they had the single vaccine which they were then giving just to young adolescent girls, and I had it then. I had mumps as a young child; no major problems for me, but a boy I knew was *very* ill with encephalitis from mumps - fortunately he recovered.

I had smallpox vaccine as a baby, and then again when I was 7 or 8 and was about to travel with my family to Canada which required booster vaccines. We were all warned not to get the vaccinated area wet, as that could make the reaction worse. By the time I was in my teens, smallpox was so rare that people were no longer vaccinated; and then there was the exciting announcement that it had been eradicated!

This is all referring to Britain in the mid/late 60s and 70s.

I recall it completely. For some reason as a child in the 1950s, I thought the polio virus was carried by insects and I was scared to death every time I heard a fly buzzing around.

RIP Shirley.

I was 3 and did everything and went everywhere he did. He got polio I did not. A lot of people had braces. The kids made fun of my brother and I fought them. He had a hard life and died young as a result of the polio.

I think Polio Pioneers was the name used for kids who participated in the vaccine tests. I was supposed to be one, but polio cases broke out in the city before they could administer the vaccine so they did not use us in the tests. I know a lot more about medical experimentation than I did then; at the time I didn't really know what was going on.

In 1952 there were 21,000 cases of paralysis due to polio. (out of a population of 120 million)

Thanks to the vaccine, the last case of polio reported in the US was in 1979.

Polio-Free for 30 years.

it was before Salk, and we all had to be innoculated with gamma gobulin (sp?) which was supposed to make the polio less lethal if we did catch it. Yes, I remember.

I saw an old iron lung For Sale in an Axemans in St Paul a couple of years ago.
It brought back the memories.


This thread makes me wonder what other vaccines and cures we (the US) could have developed if we had spent $1Trillion Dollars on Health instead of the War on Iraq.

The Polio Vaccine and SmallPox Vaccine were distributed for FREE. Can you imagine what the vultures would charge for it today? Only the RICH could afford it.

The USA was a different place in the '50s and 60's.
That was before the RICH bought both political parties.



The Democratic Party is a BIG TENT, but there is NO ROOM for those
who advance the agenda of THE RICH (Corporate Owners) at the EXPENSE of LABOR and the POOR.

It was distributed at tax payer expense.

We paid for it indirectly.

just like ALL HealthCare should be.

All told, investment in polio vaccination probably EARNED the nation many billions of dollars.

I remember the shots but some people still got polio into the early 1960's.

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1. not spread by casual contact, air or water
2. not a childhood disease
3. much lower incidence
4. high cure rate

There are a fair number of people in this forum who disapprove of ALL vaccines.

& trying to link the two is ludicrous.

I don't think that cosmik was trying to equate polio and cervical cancer. Rather, there seem to be a number of people around these parts that are against vaccines part and parcel.

The exact quote from Post 22 was:

Fear is a terrible way to live whether you fear cervical cancer or the vaccine that helps to prevent it.

The overwhelming content of the post is talking about epidemics in general. Cervical cancer is mentioned only at the end, and not equated to polio in any way. You're the one that linked them.

To try to make it something else is ludicrous.

No one lives in "fear" of cervical cancer as people did with polio, nor of vaccines as with polio.

Linking them is ludicrous.

There were 60,000 cases of polio in 1952, mostly children, & the disease was transmitted by casual contact & incurable.

But you are not worth it.

as swimming pools or lakes. When the vaccine came out, I swear the needle was as big as a turkey baster. Hurt like a son of a gun. I think it was about the same era that we had the drills in school where you ducked your body under the desk and tucked your head down in order to survive an "atom Bomb" attack.

the vaccine and standing in a long line to get the sugar cube.

I also remember a boy in the neighborhood who had leg braces, but I don't remember the reason. Polio seems a likely possibility.

Incidentally, I remember 1955 as the first year that I wrote the date on homework.

Her brother died.

He's now 66 years old. He contracted polio as a small boy and was hospitalized in an iron lung. His story is very inspiring.

Johnny realized that he would never get out of the iron lung unless he learned to breathe AGAINST it. And so he did. When it tried to force him to breathe in, he breathed out. Etc.

When he was out of the iron lung (success!) he was in a ward with other bedridden children like himself; they could not walk. He realized he would not get out of the ward until he could walk. At night he would pull himself out of the bed and stumble around it, holding on to the bed. Over, and over, and over. For most of his life after that, he only suffered a slight limp in his gait.

His recovery was a real story of courage and determination.

He now suffers post polio syndrome and is barely mobile. Recently he was standing and his knee gave out and he collapsed on his foot in a way that bent the toes forward so far that the skin on the bottom of his toes split open. He has never worn braces, incidentally. Just hardheaded.

A lot of people here seem to have forgotten that.

:rofl:

Not one thin dime. Not a cent. The polio vaccine was the third of the three greatest medical discoveries of teh 20th century. The other two were the discovery of insulin by Banting and Best and of penicillin by Fleming. None of them ever made money from their discoveries either.

Now what is this horseshit about how medical researchers can only be motivated by the lure of huge profits?

It's amazing how much we take for granted nowadays, which I guess was part of the reason for CD creating this great thread.

e.g., penicillin, also taken for granted. But in most of Europe right after WWII, it was extremely hard to get and the supply was controlled by the Allied occupation forces.

Some European doctors resorted to buying it on the black market. That was very dangerous because crooks often diluted the penicillin with water, which killed people. (Of course, modern corporations do EXACTLY the same thing. Insert your own sarcasm smiley...)

In Vienna, Austria, a doctor in charge of a children's hospital literally begged the local American military commander for penicillin.

The American officer said he couldn't help, since his medical supplies were for military use only and strictly monitored by his superiors. There's a very good reason an occupying army would need lots of penicillin in a war-ravaged nation, and you can probably figure it out yourself.

But the officer also complained that he was short-handed and security was sometimes very lax in his area. So he wouldn't be a bit surprised if somebody broke into a warehouse some night and walked off with a few cases of penicillin.

Especially if he forgot and left the warehouse unlocked.

And that's exactly what happened. One of the stories that makes me proud to be an American!

If the story sounds familiar, it was used as part of the plot in the classic movie The Third Man. The Criterion DVD release has an interview with the Austrian doctor who was involved in the Penicillin Heist.

back to work part-time somewhere around 1962, She told me she knew things were different when she walked through the hospital basement and saw all the iron lungs lined up to be disposed of.

there appears to be rampant neuron deficiency disorder here, especially the wacko from waco.
polio is a contagious childhood disease. hpv is not contagious. it is good public policy to vaccinate children against airborne childhood diseases. but how stupid do you have to be to think this has any relevance to the question of whether it is good public policy to vaccinate children against sexually transmitted diseases?

HPV most certainly IS contagious.

con·ta·gious (kn-tjs)
adj.
1. Of or relating to contagion.
2. Transmissible by direct or indirect contact; communicable: a contagious disease.
3. Capable of transmitting disease; carrying a disease: stayed at home until he was no longer contagious.
4. Spreading or tending to spread from one to another; infectious: a contagious smile.

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