I still have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm from when I was vaccinated 60 years ago, but it was far preferable to getting smallpox. I got to experience measles, mumps, and chickenpox first hand, but was fortunate to have been born after the polio epidemics of the 1950s. When I was growing up, I knew kids who were a few years older than me that were not so fortunate.
In the history of mankind, we have managed to eradicate only one human virus, smallpox, and it took over 150 years of vaccinations to do it. We almost managed to eradicate polio after only 75 years of vaccinations, but cases kept popping up in the wild in Afghanistan. After Brandon abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, polio is likely to start spreading again, along with Afghanistan refugees.
My neighbor’s Mom had Polio. She was a Catholic School teacher.
Walked with assistance of canes and weird looking devices.
Always a reminder how devastating that virus was.
I’m not even sure they’re giving the Polio vaccine anymore.
Honestly our enemies could take advantage of vaccines we stopped giving.
Same here! Smallpox scar, and my mother made sure I got exposed to chickenpox and “German measles”. Ugh. I had the most horrible case of itchy itchy chicken pox and was made to wear my little cotton Sunday School cotton gloves to keep from scratching them.
Being a girl, I escaped mumps, but Mom made sure my poor little baby brother caught it as a toddler. It was how responsible patents did it back then. Better to have daughters catch measles as a toddler than to catch it while pregnant as an adult, better to have sons catch mumps while toddlers, too, for obvious reasons.
I still remember getting the “Polio sugar cube” deposited on my tongue by a public health nurse at the A&P grocery store, mainly because my parents were so ecstatic this was now available to protect their child.
The mother of the little girl who lived up the street, who was younger than I, opted not to have her daughter get the sugar cube, and she got polio and then the braces on her little legs. When I was a bit older, I used to push her swing for her in her backyard, play Jacks and Go Fish and other little games with her, read to her, to cheer her up and be a sort of playmamate and “big sister” to her. I used to cry over her once I got home, though.
Her mother ended up being my 7th grade choir teacher. It was her never-ending sorrow that she did not let her little girl get the sugar cube. I may have cried even more over her. What a horrible guilt this poor sweet lady suffered.
Polio is still kicking around Pakistan, too.
Seeing the kids crippled by polio in Cambodia in the early 1990s was beyond heartbreaking. No braces, no wheelcairs, no treatment, no nothing. A few of them scuttled about on all fours, face-up, like upside-down spiders, with seriously deformed elongated and shriveled limbs. I really did think my heart would break into a million pieces. Even those in deveoped countries who witnessed the tragic spectacle of kids in braces and wheelchairs before vaccine was available had no clue how horrific that disease can be in countries without wheelchairs and braces. There’s more, but I’ll stop there, as it’s just too tragic.
Good observation about how hard it is to eradicate horrible diseases. We truly are at war with Nature in that sense, and our viral, bacterial and parasitical enemies are more formidable than we like to imagine.