[hanamizu]

The virus was awful in children

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I believe an alternate name for polio was infantile paralysis. Like Wuhan, polio could be quite mild, like a bad cold; bad, temporary weakness of a limb very bad, paralysis from the waist down; awful paralysis from the neck down—living in an iron lung; and less remembered now, death.

As a little kid, the iron lung terrified me. TV would show little kids lying on their backs with a tilted mirror to see the world bravely reading propped up books, turning the pages with stick in their mouths. March of Dimes even had little iron lung banks to put your dimes in.

[BluegrassCardinal]

My mom told me she was terrified of contracting to polio as a child. During the height of the epidemic, she would have been 6 or 7. If that wasn’t bad enough, that generation of kids moved on to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62. Pretty scary time to be alive.