It’s very hard to understand which kids are going to react this way and which aren’t,” Lurie’s Malakooti said.
Do you want your kids not to get flaccid paralysis as a sequela of a mild enterovirus??? It’s easy: keep their blood levels of vitamin D high.
Even in the early 1900s this was true. Kids who were taken to a beach house for the summer didn’t get it much but the families who lived in darkened narrow city streets fell prey much more.
Pretty much every kid will get the enterovirus when exposed. Most will be symptom free, but some will have a tummy ache, or a “stomach bug” or a “cold.” Only the absolute worst cases will end up with flaccid paralysis. And those will be the kids who were lowest in vitamin d or otherwise immunocompromised.
Polio is also classified as an enterovirus. Although the disease can be deadly, it, too, can affect different patients differently. Some have even suggested that there is a genetic component that makes some more susceptible than others. My cousin had six children, all in the days before the development of the vaccine. Every other child had polio, even though, obviously, they were all grew up in the same household and were exposed to much the same environment outside of their home.