What is Polio

By Statton Wilson

From the LA Times Iron Lung Ward

Photograph by Lorem Ipsum via Unsplash

Polio (Poliomyelitis) is a disease spread through contaminated water and food. Polio is caused by the poliovirus, it affects the brain, spinal cord, and muscle paralysis. During the summer kids would go swimming and the disease would spread as they swam. They would come out feeling muscle soreness and run high fevers. Parents and doctors did not know what was causing the disease.

In 1921 a politician named Franklin D. Roosevelt came down with the polio disease. He then created the Warm Springs Foundation, which was a place with warm pools for polio stricken people to come and get better with the pools’ “healing powers‘’. When he became President of The United States he gave a man named Basil O’Connor full control of the foundation and the job to lead the way to find a cure. A couple of months later scientists found that it was spreading through water and food, but no one had a cure for the disease.

The harsh mathematics of polio makes it clear:
We cannot maintain a level of one thousand or two thousand cases a year. Either we eradicate polio, or we return to the days of tens of thousands of cases per year. That is no alternative at all. We don’t let children die because it is fatiguing to save them. Our commitment as a foundation is to work with partners until no children die from polio.

Bill Gates

O’conner started a campaign to have every american citizen donate a dime to fight the disease. This was during the Great Depression when even the wealthy were struggling with money. This campaign changed foundation funding where they learned a little money from the millions was better than a lot from the few. It raised about $1.8 million dollars and the campaign was named The March of Dimes.

Polio could strike anyone at any time but mostly during the summer. This made everyone very scared. People would fog their towns with DDT even though scientists proved that Polio wasn’t spread through flies or other insects.. While on a business trip, O’Conner met a driven scientist named Jonas Salk. He knew that polio was affecting people every day so he worked quickly. His vaccine used a dead strain of the disease to trick the immune system to build up an immunity. He tested on monkeys and the vaccine worked. He decided to test it on his family and it worked.

Meanwhile, people with polio were being put into iron lungs because their diaphragm, the muscle that moves the lungs, was paralyzed. An iron lung is a machine that takes control of your breathing and controls your respiration rate. It was permanent for some and temporary for others. In 1954 O’Conner and Salk announced that he would test the vaccine on hundreds of thousands of kids. April 26,1954 began the trial period for vaccinating. By that June over 2 million kids had received the vaccine, but they would have to wait a year to find the results. The results came back that the vaccine worked. Polio was officially eradicated in 1994.

I interviewed my grandpa because he had Polio in 1950. His mom took him to the doctor because he would cry if anyone touched him. At 11 months of age he was taken to the hospital where his parents had to leave him as they had just had another new baby. Doctors and nurses cared for him. He was so young and doesn’t remember much but a few thing s have stayed with him. He always gets sick at the smell of rubbing alcohol. This probably happens because he smelled it before every shot and procedure in the hospital. He was in an iron lung for a week or two, because of this he is still very claustrophobic. Polio paralyzed a muscle in his right leg that’s used for walking and running. He learned to walk and run, in his own way, but feels most alive on the back of a horse where the horse is doing the walking and running. I think it’s incredible that something that happened to him when he was young still effects him today, 60 years later. Also, thanks to the work of President Roosevelt, Salk, O’conner, The March of Dimes, and others that I don’t know, made it possible for me to not live in fear of the dreaded disease Polio.