Posted on 04/04/2020 1:53:57 PM PDT by Hojczyk
FEB. 25, 2015
April 12, 2015 will be the 60th anniversary of the announcement of the Salk vaccine’s ability to prevent polio. Had it been available at your local CVS like flu shots are today, they would have had to call out the National Guard to handle the stampede.
In the early 1950s, there was no diagnosis more terrifying to parents than polio. In the 1952 epidemic, nearly 58,000 cases were reported, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with varying degrees of paralysis. There wasn’t a parent in America who would have requested a “personal belief waiver” to exempt their child from that shot.
Polio aside, in my childhood, there was no hope of avoiding measles, mumps, chicken pox and rubella (German measles) — miserable afflictions that I would never have wanted to inflict on my kids.
There could also be serious lasting repercussions to these illnesses: the pregnant neighbor who contracted rubella, (German measles) whose baby was born with severe birth defects; cases of deafness following mumps; encephalitis from measles. The curvature in my spine (and decades of back pain that has gone with it) is likely from polio.
When rubella came around again, my mother sent me to the home of a friend who had it to be sure I’d contracted it well before my childbearing years.
A new generation of young parents have never personally experienced diseases now preventable by vaccines. That’s both the good and the bad news. I guess for some, it’s easier to fear the autism spectrum they actually see.
But I wish every parent who doesn’t vaccinate their child could travel back to a 1950’s polio ward full of kids in iron lungs, or watch children suffer horribly — and sometimes permanently — from now-avoidable afflictions.
(Excerpt) Read more at lajollalight.com ...
Nothing is as frightening than to see someone confined to an iron lung.
I have been to Warm Springs Georgia a few times to see The Little White House and what was then the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation for rehabilitation from infantile paralysis.
Thanks for your testimony, very different time, much harder life. My mother came down with polio just prior to giving birth to me. She did recover completely, although because of it, she was unable to breast feed me. Guess that’s why I’ve always been a “Leg” man ;-)
hello, i brought this up. the whole country did not lose its mind during polio.
I’m most of the time with you, but you can also be really humorous with your zealous crusade.
My older sister caught polio when she was around five years old. She was a normal child who ran, jumped and played with me and the other kids. I remember when she was a March of Dimes poster child, cute little girl with a plaid dress and a smile that was always on her face showing her dimple. Her posters were in the windows of the local drug store, Cunningham’s. One late afternoon she was on tv in some clinic with a nurse walking on a ramp with bars on each side for her balance. The smile was there as she struggled to walk with her leg braces. Five years later they broke every bone in her back and inserted a stainless rod down her spine to overcome her scoliosis. She lived in our living room in a hospital bed with a full body cast for an entire year. Then she went to a 3/4 body cast for 1 1/2 years and then to a body brace. I got very good at scrabble and chess with my homebound sister. Kids are cruel, on Halloween “Look, a crippled ghost”. Or our koolaid stand “Don’t drink the lemonaid, you’ll get polio”. Her homeschooling had her graduate from public school at 16 years and a four degree from a state college at 20. She got married and had two children. She lacked the muscles for childbirth and had casaerian. She is now 71 years old and is dealing with post polio syndrome. She has a minivan with a small crane in the back for her battery operated Amigo. There were others with polio who gave up. I’m proud of my sister and all she has overcome and accomplished.
I can’t imagine the guilt and pain my parents went through blaming themselves for this disease my beautiful sister caught. The polio epidemic was raging and my mom did everything she could to keep everything clean and sterile. I remember going to the fountain at Lourde’s and my sister thinking she could drink the water and throw away her crutches. She walked away from the fountain on her crutches with her always there smile and dimple resigned to her affliction.
Yeah, both of them, right?
Some years ago I was working at an office and the head of my department became ill, very ill but kept coming to work until she was finally so ill that she finally took a day off, just one day off mind you. But then she came back to work the next day and she was still feverish and visibly sweating, flushed, her eyes red and swollen and coughing up a storm but claiming that her “doctor” had told her she was no longer contagious.
What did she have? Purtussis, i.e. Whopping Cough.
I along with a co-worker who had just had a baby 6 weeks earlier and several others were in a meeting with her, in her very small office watching her sweat and continually and deeply cough as she told us it was “just whooping cough” and nothing at all to be concerned about and then went on to go on a long rant and lecture to us about how vaccines are more dangerous than the disease and how her “doctor” (actually as she told us her chiropractor and not an MD), had prescribed herbal remedies which she told us was much better than any modern medicine.
The woman who had just had her baby was pretty upset and left the meeting. I myself was not as much concerned for myself as I’ve been vaccinated but wondered how many others weren’t.
A few days later this department head was off work again. At first I presumed because she was too ill, but it turned out she had transmitted her Pertussis to her infant granddaughter who was now in the hospital in intensive care, on a ventilator, seriously ill and not expected to live. Thankfully the baby did eventually recover but only after several weeks in the hospital.
Oh and three others in our office suite who were not vaccinated also became ill and missed at least a week of work.
But did this woman change her mind about vaccinations? No. Proving that you just can’t cure stupid.
I have clear memories of about 30% of my 3rd grade classmates disappearing to polio in 1941... Almost as bad in 1942... All our (us kids) favorite swimming ponds, streams, lakes, and reservoirs were closed down after being identified as the source of the contagion...
Polio, in those days, either killed you or crippled you for life... Strictly a binomial outcome...
I generally don’t try to discuss it anymore, there’s way too many people who get Extremely emotional, illogical, and angry.
A few years ago, I read an interesting book About the polio epidemic, and your heart definitely went out to parents who were seeing young kids getting sick, and we’re scared to death.
It’s one thing if it’s you or someone you work with, it’s quite another thing if you have children who are vulnerable.
There was panic.
I'm sixty-seven, and still feel pangs of guilt over things I said and did when I was young.
Years ago now, I studied abroad. I saw a number of middle-aged people who’d had polio. Shocked me and helped me realize that I had escaped what must have happened in the US.
Oh yeah, tetanus. My young life was filled with those dreaded tetanus shots. Seems like I had one every month after all the usual scrapes and abrasions an active kid experiences. Sorry about your step-cousin but a vaccine was available as early as 1938. The disease is still with us today.
https://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/Tetanus/vaccine-history.aspx
Hell, almost all kids are assholes. We all were. One of the important things about growing up is learning right from wrong. Parents have to teach kids these things, and are many things kids have to learn on their own.
I got bullied quite a bit of a kid, but in an odd way, it’s Part of me in a good way.
I kind of like underdogs, and helped me in my relationships with other people. I treat people like I would like to be treated generally, and I didn’t really careFor being bullied just because I was uncoordinated and wore glasses.
I have often thought that those black plastic glasses (what we called in the military “birth control device glasses, or BCD glasses) We’re simply bully magnets, like a cello case.
In 1958 they thought I had polio. Turns out I didn’t; it was osteomyelitis. Was in the hospital flat on my back in a body cast for six months. There were several kids there with me who did have polio — a terrible thing. I remember getting the shots, but don’t recall sugar cubes.
You got that right. Also the sound it makes is like something out of a horror movie or Darth Vader breathing.
A housemate I had in grad school caught polio as a child and limped from having one leg shorter than the other. But he always had a cheerful attitude. Had his PhD in biology, then later got an MD after marrying a doctor. Some folks just never give up.
Yes the noise an iron lung makes is truly frightening.
I fell off a roof one time of an abandoned stable into a pile of scrap metal… Rusty scrap metal… Old bed springs things like that.
It poked a hole in my shin about a half inch across and I can see clearly in to the whole deeply… Things.
I was so petrified of getting a tetanus shot and stitches, that I never told my parents about it (I think I was about seven at the time) and it took about a year for the thing to heal over (I kept it hidden from my mom And dad). It developed a penny sized circular purple scar that was very thin skinned, almost as if it was a thin covering of purple Saran Wrap.
However, about three years later I was someplace I shouldn’t have been climbing around on rocks near the ocean on the naval base I lived at, And I slipped and fell between some rocks.
I lost my glasses and sliced open that penny sized scar on my shin. I couldn’t Hide both the loss of my glasses and the hole in my shin So it was off for stitches and a tetanus shot that I went.
Yeah, I can imagine that pretty easily. It would have an effect.
The good thing is, that definitely means that you’re normal
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.