Mary Berry health: Bake off judge's condition left her 'alone and feeling terrible' - Express

Mary Berry health: Bake off judge's condition left her 'alone and feeling terrible' - Express
Glimpse of the Past: Polio epidemic in 1940s-1950s affected Mankato residents - Mankato Free Press
Polio survivor joins Rotary International in urging vaccinations - Bucks County Courier Times
As some states reopen, studying sewage could help stop the coronavirus pandemic - USA TODAY

Posted: 18 May 2020 01:13 AM PDT

Mary Berry has a regal demeanour that is steeped in British symbolism and heritage. It is not a coincidence that she is tied to franchises that celebrate Britishness such as Britain's Best Home Cook and the Great British Bake off, a show she took part in for six years. In fact, Mary is so wedded to the idea of Britishness it is hard to imagine life without her.

Most people with polio don't have any symptoms and won't know they're infected, but for some people, the virus causes temporary or permanent paralysis, which can be life threatening, notes the health body.

Cases of polio in the UK fell dramatically when routine vaccination was introduced in the mid-1950s but the infection is still found in some parts of the world, and there remains a very small risk it could be brought back to the UK.

How do I know if I have it?

"Most people with polio won't have any symptoms and will fight off the infection without even realising they were infected," explained the NHS.

A small number of people will experience a flu-like illness three to 21 days after they're infected, however.

Symptoms can include:

A high temperature (fever) of 38C (100.4F) or above
A sore throat
A headache
Abdominal (tummy) pain
Aching muscles

In a small number of cases, the polio virus attacks the nerves in the spine and base of the brain, which can cause paralysis, usually in the legs, that develops over hours or days, notes the NHS.

"The paralysis isn't usually permanent, and movement will often slowly return over the next few weeks and months," explained the health body.

It added: "But some people are left with persistent problems. If the breathing muscles are affected, it can be life threatening."

Glimpse of the Past: Polio epidemic in 1940s-1950s affected Mankato residents - Mankato Free Press

Posted: 25 Apr 2020 12:00 AM PDT

The Free Press

The late Dr. John "Jack" Heimark began his career at a clinic in Mankato during a time when the last great public epidemic — polio — was rampant.

"When I was in medical school in 1950, there were iron lung machines everywhere. It was frightening," Heidmark told The Free Press in 2003.

The poliovirus hit without warning and weakened victims' muscles. When spinal muscles near the neck were weakened, patients had difficulty breathing.

The iron lung was a common form of treatment for polio victims. The machines were large tubes in which the patient laid inside with his or her head sticking out the end.

A collar around the neck kept the machine airtight inside.

Air was pumped in and out of the machine, helping to lift the chest and lungs to assist in breathing. Patients had to be in the iron lungs often for days or weeks, but sometimes longer.

"They were big, menacing machines. They were in the halls, everywhere. People who suffered severe problems were usually sent to the U of M because they had the most of the iron lung machines," Heimark said.

Most people who got polio suffered much milder symptoms — usually headache, stiff neck, fever and muscle soreness — that subsided in a few days or weeks, he said.

"Whenever we treated young people with headaches, we had to be aware they might have had polio."

Polio patients required long quarantine periods.

About 10% of people with polio died from it in the 1940s and 1950s. Some who survived were paralyzed.

Many who recovered later had post-polio symptoms — often muscle weakness in a leg or arm.

Retired Mankato attorney Bailey Blethen is among many who suffered symptoms decades after contracting and recovering from polio. In fact, Blethen didn't know he had polio as a child.

"I had trouble with my legs in the first grade, in '42 or '43. I had trouble getting up and walking well. My doctors told my parents it was not polio," he told The Free Press in 2003.

Blethen not only recovered but went on to be an avid runner and competitive golfer. But in 1985, his leg began to weaken.

"I couldn't finish a round of golf. I thought maybe I had been doing too much running."

But a test at the Orthopaedic and Fracture Clinic by a neurological specialist quickly confirmed Belethen had indeed suffered from polio as a child.

For Heimark's and Blethen's generation, the advent of the oral polio vaccine was a revolution. Discovered by researcher Jonas Salk, the vaccine was approved for public use in 1955.

By 1961, incidents of polio had dropped 95 percent.

"The Salk vaccine was a miracle at the time," Blethen said. "It didn't benefit me, but there were thousands of others it saved."

But the advent and use of polio vaccine has been fiercely debated. Some argued polio rates were rapidly declining before the vaccination efforts and that side effects of the vaccine suffered by some people outweighed the benefits.

Heimark said he'd seen enough serious and deadly disease outbreaks to know that the small risk from vaccination is well worth the prevention of disease.

"Flu, polio, smallpox have all pretty much been wiped out by vaccines. The illnesses and diseases change, and you have to be ready ... People can have reactions to vaccines, but it's rare. It's a lot better to not have to worry about outbreaks."

Polio survivor joins Rotary International in urging vaccinations - Bucks County Courier Times

Posted: 16 May 2020 09:01 AM PDT

Carversville woman also urges COVID-19 patients to remain optimistic.

As a 2-year-old living in Glenside in 1954, Carol Ferguson got what everyone called "the summer grip."

When she recovered, she had a "drop foot" that didn't move well.

She doesn't remember much talk about her affliction. It was something she had to live with.

Then when she was about 12, a doctor told her, "that's a polio foot."

She started to understand why her parents didn't discuss her condition

"They knew it was polio," she said. She thinks her parents didn't take her for treatment as a toddler because "their house would have been quarantined. My father wouldn't have been able to go to work."

For a family to have a child with polio created a stigma, something that other people feared. If the symptoms weren't too bad, it was better left unspoken, she said.

When the polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk became available in 1955 and the oral vaccine made by Dr. Albert Sabin in the early 1960s, millions of children were vaccinated and the spread of the polio virus was greatly reduced, though not eliminated, around the world.

But for polio survivors like Ferguson, the disease sometimes causes symptoms years after the initial illness. She had complications from anesthesia in her 30s and in later years, the weakness in her foot and leg returned and grew worse. Now she wears a brace when needed and uses a scooter when shopping.

This is called post-polio syndrome. "Polio — you couldn't get better, the disease continues," she said. "Polio is a disease that doesn't strike you once, but twice."

Ferguson wanted to find out more about her condition, so she went to a symposium in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2014. Her husband worried about her going alone. She told him she was fine. She had her bright red scooter to ride around on.

"That was the experience that changed my life," she said. More than 400 people attended, including survivors and family members. She learned there were only a few small support groups in Pennsylvania who had trouble sharing information.

"Gathering a supportive and working team became a necessity," she said.

So Ferguson, who lives in the Carversville section of Plumstead, founded the Pennsylvania Polio Survivors Network with three other survivors and some family members.

"Over the next few months I learned how to launch a website, use Facebook and call complete strangers for advice," she said.

Ferguson found that that other polio victims who had worse paralysis and had to be hospitalized as children for long periods of time, often had repressed fears of their experience that surfaced when their post-polio symptoms appeared.

As she's watched the stories of people facing COVID-19 in hospitals or nursing homes without loved ones allowed to be there to support them, it reminded her of her friends who had gone through similar experiences. They remembered long months away from family, parents who had to visit them through glass walls and the frightening sounds of iron lungs breathing for children whose chest muscles were paralyzed. One woman remembered her pigtails being cut off and her teddy bear taken away.

But they're survivors. Ferguson and other network members want to share their optimism with victims of COVID-19, who also may be cut off from family and friends as they undergo treatment now.

"We want to bring light," she said.

The polio victims also are working with Rotary International in its effort to promote vaccinations worldwide through its Polio Plus campaign. Ferguson joined the Doylestown Rotary and has found that "disabled polio survivors can be part of the solution" in getting people to take vaccinations seriously, which she thinks will be of utmost importance if and when a coronavirus vaccine is developed.

She never realized all the work Rotary does in foreign countries to promote vaccinations and that it is a member of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. She learned that those who have had polio have a big role to play.

In an issue of The Rotarian, the magazine highlights a polio survivor in Nigeria who makes hand-driven bicycles for other polio victims to use if their legs no longer function. Another survivor uses one of the bikes to accompany health workers to villages where people might be afraid of vaccinations until they meet the woman who can't walk but who pedaled with her hand to warn them of the danger of not being vaccinated.

Here at home, the Pennsylvania Polio Survivors Network is working with Rotary to promote the showing of its film, "Why Zero Matters," in schools and other venues. The film "explains just how easily polio or any virus could return to (or) emerge in any country," she noted.

The network is also promoting the distribution of Vaccine Information Cards.

"It is our goal to raise enough funds to print and distribute this card to every new parent in the state," Ferguson said. The group is working with the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to promote that goal. Ferguson also appeared at a recent vaccine conference with Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine.

The World Health Organization announced that vaccine hesitancy was one of the top 10 global health threats in 2019, making the vaccine initiative more imperative. And now that the federal government is trying to develop a coronavirus vaccine, the work that Rotary is doing to promote vaccine acceptance here and abroad is vital, she pointed out.

"We are survivors of a vaccine preventable disease," she said, "who have come together to serve others by providing them information so they too can thrive."

For more information on the Polio Survivors Network, visit papolionetwork.org. For information on Rotary International's vaccination campaign and other efforts to eradicate polio, visit https://www.endpolio.org/.

As some states reopen, studying sewage could help stop the coronavirus pandemic - USA TODAY

Posted: 19 May 2020 08:06 AM PDT

In hundreds of cities across the United States, monitoring systems now exist that scientists hope will provide an early warning if coronavirus infections reemerge as communities in some states cautiously reopen.

These monitors don't rely on testing patients or tracing contacts.

All that's required? Human waste.

Over the past few months, private companies and university researchers have partnered with communities across the country to collect sewage at treatment plants and test it for the presence of the novel coronavirus. The results are reported back to municipal governments and state health officials to help them monitor the situation in their communities.

Testing wastewater can reveal evidence of the coronavirus and show whether it's increasing or decreasing in a community, said Ian Pepper, a professor and co-director of the University of Arizona's Water and Energy Sustainable Technology Center, which is one of the group's tracking the virus through different municipal sewage systems.

Although they cannot determine the exact number of COVID-19 cases from the wastewater, some researchers said they can estimate the potential case count based on the amount of genetic material detected, the number of customers per system and the volume of wastewater generated. They're continuing to improve upon those estimates with hopes of achieving greater accuracy.

They need a better understanding of "how much virus is shed in the stool" when someone is infected, said Newsha Ghaeli, president and co-founder of Biobot Analytics, a startup company formed by a group of researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is heavily involved in the emerging science.

"As our understanding of this evolves, and as Biobot collects more and more data," Ghaeli said, "our case estimates will be refined."

When the novel coronavirus attacks a person's body, it leaves a trail of castoff genetic evidence that winds up in wastewater flushed from toilets across a community.

Scientists watched this spring as that evidence emerged at sewage treatment facilities in places like California, Florida, Massachusetts, Paris, Australia, and the Netherlands. By sampling the wastewater, researchers detected COVID-19 hot spots days, and sometimes weeks, before those cases appeared in hospital admissions data and clinical testing.

Such early detection — the virus marks the body before or even without the development of physical symptoms like a fever or cough — is aimed at helping communities better respond to the pandemic. Officials can issue stay-at-home orders to prevent further spread. Hospitals can stock and staff ahead of a wave of patients.

The information also can help local governments, many of which are now reporting declining COVID-19 case counts, spot the first signs of an anticipated autumn resurgence. And it can help them measure the effectiveness of their actions. In Paris, for example, the city's utility provider reported finding coronavirus particles in wastewater before the cases began to grow exponentially and then observed the quantities decrease as a result of the lockdown.

Hundreds of communities

Promising results from initial studies have since spawned widespread interest, and the science is now expanding to hundreds of public utilities across the United States through a collection of initiatives.

Most prolific is Biobot Analytics, which previously worked with local governments to track the prevalence of opioid use through wastewater testing before shifting focus to COVID-19 earlier this year. Now it said it's monitoring wastewater data from 400 communities across 42 states.

With $6.7 million in seed money and collaborations with researchers at MIT, Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Biobot is providing the testing for free for now.

The company recently concluded that wastewater sampling in Massachusetts and Delaware indicated a bigger coronavirus outbreak than reported through hospital admissions and clinical testing. In New Castle County, Delaware, for example, the estimates were 15 times the laboratory-confirmed cases.

"This is a high level way of getting a quick snapshot of the scope of a virus in a community," Ghaeli said. "We're hopeful this data becomes very useful in the long run, when we have opened up again, in determining the re-emergence of the virus."

Your guide to COVID-19:What you need to know about the coronavirus

The sewage surveillance, in concert with clinical testing and reported cases, can give local officials a broad look at COVID-19 in the community, Ghaeli said. Biobot provides the numbers to participating utilities, which in turn provide the data to local officials and health departments, she said.

Among the participating utilities is the City of Albany, Oregon, which in early April started sharing with Biobot weekly samples of pre-treated sewage from the Albany-Millersburg Water Reclamation Facility.

The weekly sampling occurs alongside routine water testing, meaning little additional work for the staff, said David Gilbey, the city's environmental services manager. It costs about $120 a week for sample bottles and shipping, the city's website noted. Results usually come within a week, Gilbey said, and are shared with the county health department.

The research holds "much promise," Gilbey said. So far, the community has seen declining coronavirus cases and things are starting to reopen, he said. But if the wastewater numbers increase, that information would help the utility and local governments "get ready," whether that's adding more social distance measures or stockpiling more resources.

"It kind of gives us an idea of what we may be in for over the next couple of months," he said.

At the University of Arizona, Pepper chairs one of the many committees looking at how to handle the possible return of students to campus this fall. He said the university will sample the campus wastewater for at least a year to monitor coronavirus levels.

And in Detroit, officials announced Monday they are refocusing a two-year-old study with Michigan State University to try to detect COVID-19 in the wastewater. The study was originally designed to see if they could track disease-causing viruses in the city's sewer system.

So far, city health officials said, the Detroit study found viruses in the sewer collection system about one to two weeks before those same viruses showed up in health departments data.

Between November 2017 and February 2018 and then again between October 2018 and March 2019, samples were collected weekly before treatment at Detroit's Water Resource Recovery Facility.

Looking for disease

Scientists hope to promote development of a national wastewater surveillance network to monitor and respond to not just the coronavirus, but all kinds of infectious diseases, said Ghaeli and others.

They pointed to Israel, where a wastewater-based monitoring system for polio started in 1989. In 2013, when the surveillance indicated a polio outbreak was occurring, government officials swept in with polio vaccines and prevented any cases of paralysis.

But routine sampling for emerging viral diseases isn't yet standard practice at most wastewater treatment facilities. Ghaeli hopes it will become permanent and so prevalent that the information is routinely integrated into public health decision-making.

Monitoring wastewater could be especially beneficial as an early warning in a "micro context" for example at nursing homes or care facilities, where the rapidly spreading coronavirus has been responsible for many deaths, concluded a group of researchers led by Gorka Orive, a biomedical researcher at the University of the Basque Country in Spain.

Even in a larger context, such as a neighborhood or city, the information could help officials adopt more focused and balanced measures, including restricting movement in communities, the researchers wrote in a story to be published in the Elsevier journal, Science of the Total Environmental. Early warnings, the group wrote, could save lives.

Scientists have studied disease in sewage for years, said Kyle Bibby, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at Notre Dame. Researchers in Sweden two decades ago showed that a single infection in one person could be detected in the wastewater from 10,000 people.

But today, with the advances in genetic research and so many groups monitoring wastewater for the coronavirus, the science is moving very fast.

"Everyone is sort of learning as they go," Bibby said.

Bibby's team also is working with dozens of utilities. And the research groups are collaborating and sharing what they learn, he said.

More than a dozen research papers have been published, some in pre-print without full peer review, since the beginning of the year.

Additional research is planned.

"This is definitely a community effort," Bibby said, "through a broad, scientific community."

Dinah Voyles Pulver is an investigative reporter and environment writer for the USA TODAY Network. She can be reached at dpulver@gatehousemedia.com

Contributing: Frank Witsil of the Detroit Free Press

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