As improbable as it initially sounded last month, polio just might be making a resurgence across the U.S. and the world.
To understand what that means emotionally, as well as clinically, consider the remembrances of retired Morgantown physician Dr. Summers Harrison, who talked about the shadow wrought by the disease that can paralyze, and even kill.
Polio, as a presence, was the scourge of the warm-weather months.
Harrison grew up in rural West Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s.
When school was out, that meant a swimming hole if you lived in a coal camp, or maybe a public pool, depending upon the size of the town you called home.
God forbid, a mom would fear, should her kid wake up the next day with a fever and weak, tingly legs. That’s how it started.
Even into the 1960s, polio was still a single-word enunciation of fear, delivered in a hushed tone.
A certain M.D. from the mountains can tell you all about it.
“I wasn’t allowed to go swimming until after the first of August,” Harrison said.
Polio didn’t discriminate, you see.
It didn’t care about what your dad did for a living or that new Schwinn bike you got for Christmas.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was felled by it.
So was singer Joni Mitchell.
And there was always a classmate, with his leg brace or arm brace, all metallic and jangly, and catching the sun, on the playground at recess.
Harrison didn’t catch polio, but he still looked it straight in the face.
Polio has been here a long time, even when it hasn’t been here.
The disease, down in the gutter
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention traces the first major outbreak of polio in the U.S. back to Vermont in 1894, when 132 people came down with the virus.
A total of 6,000 people in New York City died from polio complications during the particularly virulent summer of 1916.
Most of the victims were children, and the way city health officials dealt with the disease only made it worse, according to historical accounts.
The Board of Health called for streets to be hosed down daily with water.
How much water?
Try four million gallons a day, as the outbreak was raging.
But there was just one problem: Polio is most easily and most commonly transmitted by way of water contaminated with feces.
All that water, in all those city gutters, the CDC said, most surely made the NYC outbreak even worse.
Help was on the way, however, across a time-bridge some 36 years in the future.
And Jonas Salk even slaved over a hot stove to make it all happen.
This is war, and watch the pots and pans (those handles are hot)
Technically speaking, the first clinical trials for the vaccine that changed the world took place in the kitchen of the aforementioned Salk’s comfortable home in western Pennsylvania.
Among the first, anyway.
You can call it a humanitarian variant on the mad scientist theme, if you like.
If you want to complete the image, you can picture the needles and syringes boiling on the stovetop of the friendly, inviting kitchen where Salk had his coffee every morning.
Salk was the tireless researcher who developed the first successful vaccine for polio from his lab at the University of Pittsburgh.
Well, and his kitchen, also, as said.
It was 1952, and distribution of the vaccine was three years out.
That was the year that saw 58,000 diagnosed cases across the U.S. alone.
Salk was literally and figuratively working day and night that year. What began in the lab carried over to the kitchen.
Pots and pans were deployed and arrayed to sterilize everything he needed.
He had already successfully inoculated thousands of lab monkeys, plus a trial group of several children in Pittsburgh who all cleared the shot with no ill effects.
It was time to submit to his own work.
He rolled up his sleeve, and self-administered the vaccine.
Then, he delivered it to his wife and three sons — even and especially his youngest, who hated needles but was brave for his dad.
By June 1954, a total of 1.8 million people, roughly the entire population of the state of West Virginia, had exposed their arms for the cause.
In April 1955, the vaccine was cleared and ready to go.
Victory.
Polio, all but eradicated — officially in the U.S., in 1979 — save for a handful of stubborn stops on the globe.
Then came the summer of 2022, New York State and London.
Return engagement?
Dr. Mary Bassett didn’t pull any polio punches when she made her statement two weeks ago.
Bassett, the health commissioner for New York State was talking about polio’s new worrisome presence in a collection of wastewater samples from two counties just north of New York City.
A young adult from Rockland County who wasn’t vaccinated for polio tested positive for it and did suffer paralysis.
“New Yorkers should know,” Bassett said, perhaps invoking the summer of 1916.
It was a call for residents to keep their kids, and themselves, up to date with immunizations.
“Coupled with the latest wastewater findings, the department is treating the single case of polio as just the tip of the iceberg of much greater potential spread,” she told reporters.
“The danger of polio is present in New York today.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, health officials in London reacted clinically and socially this past week, signing in an emergency order to make children ages 1-9 eligible for booster shots of the polio vaccine.
While the virus has been found in “multiple areas of the city,” no Londoners, to date, have presented with symptoms, they said.
Polio, meanwhile, has two big enemies: Entrepreneur Bill Gates and Rotary International.
Gates, who has committed millions of dollars to the cause of polio eradication through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agrees with Bassett.
The lone case in the Empire State can turn into hundreds, or thousands of cases in the Empire State, which “poses a threat to us all,” he said.
Many of the foot soldiers in the fight against the disease hail from north-central West Virginia and Monongalia County. They are the members of Rotary International, the global outreach organization.
And many of the local Rotarians have crossed oceans on mission trips to help deliver and administer the polio vaccine.
“It shows that the work is never done,” said Harry Grandon, the foundation chair for the Rotary Club of Morgantown.
“This is a true, world effort, to get as many people vaccinated as possible.”
World Polio Day 2022 is Oct. 24, he said. It’s always Oct. 24, because that day is Salk’s birthday.
Rotary International is a marquee player in the proceedings. Visit www.endpolio.org or the organization’s Facebook page to learn more about the collaboration.
Eternal wondering — but no patent
The majority of people who get polio get over it, although many are left with a weakness of some degree in their muscles, accounting for those braces that used to be a common sight.
Through the 1960s, those with the polio’s most tragic form — paralysis — found themselves encased in an iron lung.
That was the nickname of the 800-pound, tank-like respirator that did the breathing for them. It was the ventilator of its day. The machines even had foot pedals to keep the bellows operating in event of a power failure.
The actual feet for the pedals came by way of a specially designated crew on call for such an emergency.
Harrison was on shift at that hospital in San Francisco one afternoon in 1964 when he saw a patient in one.
He was in California completing his medical residency as part of his military service. The patient was a man in his 30s, he remembered.
Later that week, another patient, an 8-year-old boy, was wheeled in.
He, too, was diagnosed with polio but he didn’t require the iron lung. He was especially fretful, and Harrison and other staff took pains to talk with him and reassure him.
“Now, this was 1964,” the physician said, “and Dr. Salk’s vaccine was out there. I was sure I was seeing the last of the polio patients in America.”
As it turned out, he never saw either again.
“I was rotated out,” he said. “I heard that the little boy went home on crutches. I don’t know what happened to the man. I’ve often wondered how it worked out for the both of them.”
How it worked out for Salk was international acclaim, in one pure dose.
He was heralded for both his clinical prowess and innate altruism.
And, he found himself breathing rarified air, as a rock ‘n’ roll star, of sorts, among the lab coat class.
CBS News courted Salk, and he sat down for an interview with Edward R. Murrow, who asked if he had any plans to patent the vaccine.
In today’s world of Big Pharma, big inflation, and COVID vaccine-clinical shootouts, Salk’s answer would have blown up Twitter, while owning the 24-hour news cycle for days.
“There is no patent,” the scientist said to the newsman. “Could you patent the sun?”
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