[goat granny]

I lived through the Polio years before the Salk vaccine...My kids got the vaccine...Salk used a dead virus and it was effective, then Sabin came out with a vaccine that was a live virus...The doctors quit using Salk even tho there was no evidence that using the live virus was any more effective than the original...If I remember correctly it went from a couple of drops on the kids tongue to having to have the injection...I guess one of the pharmaceuticals gave more money to get their vaccine used...I didn't think of payoffs at the time (late 1950 to 1960’s) but it was probably going on at that time also.

To me it seemed like immunity from a dead virus was safer than immunity from a live virus.

To my parents, polio season was very real and I remember asking my mother to be able to do something (cannot remember what) but she said "NO its polio season". It wasn't a scare** polio was deadly and if you survived many had to live in an iron lung for the rest of their lives...also those children that survived without needing an iron lung ended up crippled...

[Paved Paradise]

I remember having to wait in line with a lot of people to get the sugar cube thing.

There was a guy on Michael Medved’s show awhile back and he wrote a book about polio. It sounded fascinating. He said that polio was a rich man’s disease and that no poor people ever got polio. In fact, he said that even in the U.S., the people living in squalor, in tenement, or in the very poor parts of town simply did not get polio.

He explained why but I forgot that (duh - the most important part) but I think it had something to do with hygiene and the cleaner the people, the more likely they were to get it.

Interesting, huh?