We have a wonderful cause for a 60 year celebration in October. Polio has no cure but it has a safe, secure vaccine which we now simply take for granted in Australia.
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When I was a child there was a whole smorgasbord of illnesses which killed children. Childhood friends in my street died of whooping cough, typhoid, measles, diphtheria and polio.
Parents lived daily in fear of losing their children to any number of diseases. My mother reminded me often that, as a very young child, I came close to dying with a combination of measles and whooping cough. She would dramatically describe how she carried me out into the blackest of wintry rainy nights, as she ‘couldn’t bear to see me die’. She tipped me upside down and belted me on the back until I regained my breath.
Polio probably caused the most anxiety. Polio was a random killer, and over a period of years many thousands of children and adults around the world either died or were rendered paralysed, some so severely they spent their lives in iron lungs, others continued on with their lives disabled with a limb or limbs paralysed for life. Polio treatments were harsh and rigid, with very little science behind the therapies that were administered to patients.
Patients described it as ‘medieval torture’.
Polio was so feared that I was forbidden to go shopping with my mother, and my older brother was home from school for some time as schools were shut during the peak of the disease.
Every day brought more frightening stories of relatives and friends succumbing to the virus. The virus attacked the nervous system which controlled muscles and it also affected breathing. People were paralysed and it was particularly dangerous in young children who had great difficulty breathing. Fear was everywhere.
Just as we have bizarre theories and quasi-medical treatments for autism, cancer and any number of other medically diagnosed conditions today, there were many theories behind the polio virus. Scientists were eventually able to prove that the virus was transmitted via faecal material.
Dr Jonas Salk and Dr Albert Sabin were among many scientists working ceaselessly to find a vaccine to combat the virus. Both were successful with different vaccines (Oshinsky,2005). In 1956 the first mass Salk vaccine for polio was administered to the public by injection. By the 1960s the Salk vaccine was replaced by the simpler orally taken Sabin vaccine. I vividly remember lining up as a young teacher in front of my class to sip the sticky pink mixture on the end of a plastic spoon, proving to the class that I wasn’t about to die!
In America, in one year, cases of polio dropped from 100,000 to 0.1 cases (ABC radio, 2016). A hugely significant drop.
There is another part of this polio story today because there is a Post Polio Syndrome. Survivors are now experiencing debilitating symptoms of fatigue and muscle loss as they age. It is now a recognised medical condition and survivors have formed the PPS group to support each other.
Parents who ignore the science and refuse to have their children vaccinated against polio and other childhood diseases, which are also killers, are reprehensible in their responsibility to their children and the community.
Thanks to science and scientists vaccinations have changed this frightening scenario forever. Let’s celebrate!
ANNIE YOUNG