IN-DEPTH: Polio was just as daunting in U.S. - Atlanta Journal Constitution

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 07:45 AM PDT

As a result, by 1979 the disease was eradicated in the U.S.

A parent's nightmare

While today's children learned to stay at home and attend school remotely, wear masks when they went anywhere and frequently use hand sanitizer, many of their grandparents remember childhood summers dominated by concern about the airborne virus, which was also spread through feces. Some parents banned their kids from public swimming pools and neighborhood playgrounds and avoided large gatherings.

In this Oct. 7, 1954, file photo, Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, holds a rack of test tubes in his lab in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo, File)

Credit: Uncredited

"Polio was something my parents were very scared of," says Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, now 74. "My dad was a big baseball fan, but very careful not to take me into big crowds ... my Dad's friend thought his son caught it at a Cardinals game."

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A 1955 newspaper photo surfaced recently showing DeWine becoming one of the first second-graders in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to get a vaccination shot. His future wife, Fran Struewing, was a classmate who got hers that day, too. Sixty-six years later, they got the COVID-19 vaccination shots together.

DeWine, a Republican, has drawn criticism within the state and his own party for his aggressive response to the COVID-19 outbreak. But he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who overcame a childhood case of polio, and others of that time remember the importance of developing vaccines and of widespread inoculations.

Martha Wilson, now 88 and a student nurse at Indiana University in the early 1950s, remembers the nationwide relief when a polio vaccine was developed after years of work. She thinks some people today don't appreciate "how rapidly they got a vaccine for COVID." She doesn't take for granted returning to the kind of safer life that allows for planning a big family reunion around Labor Day.

DeWine thinks a key contrast between the 1960s and today, with its reluctance of so many Americans to get vaccinated, is that polio tended to afflict children and had become many parents' worst nightmare.

In this July 18, 1962, file photo, a girl swallows a lump of sugar coated with a dose of the Sabin polio vaccine, served in a paper cup in Atlanta. Tens of millions of today's older Americans lived through the polio epidemic, their childhood summers dominated by concern about the virus. (AP Photo/File)

Credit: Uncredited

"I know our parents were relieved when we were finally going to get a shot," Fran DeWine recalls.

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Her husband recently initiated a series of $1 million lotteries to pump up sluggish COVID-19 vaccination participation among Ohioans. President Joe Biden last week announced a "month of action" with incentives such as free beer and sports tickets to drive U.S. vaccinations.

Wigness blames today's divisive politics and anti-science messages spread over talk shows and social media. Ferris, the teen he mentors, says he sees criticism of mask-wearing and other precaution among some of his peers. Ferris says the polio eradication success "certainly means it's possible we can beat COVID, but it entirely depends on people."

Iron lungs

Martha Wilson, now living in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, talked about polio and COVID-19 in a recent Zoom call with her granddaughter, Hanna Wilson, 28, of suburban New York. She reflected on treating patients iron lungs, a kind of ventilator used to treat polio.

"They were very confining. ... It was not a very nice life," says Wilson.

"I remember a book I read when I was a little kid, 'Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio,' by Peg Kehret. And it stuck with me," Hanna says. "And I remember the iron lungs and things like that. But when I asked people about it — 'Hey, do you remember what polio was?' — no one knew."

Hanna, an athletics administrator for the Big East Conference, happened to be in Iran in December 2019 when she heard the first reports of a new virus in China. She was visiting a grandfather, Aboulfath Rohani, who would die there a few months later at age 97.

Back home, her job was quickly transformed. Games, then tournaments, then entire seasons were canceled.

"It's been eye-opening,' she says. "So many people denied that it was real, they hadn't seen anything like this."

1918 flu pandemic

Both she and her grandmother point out that the nation endured not only polio but a deadly flu pandemic in 1918 whose estimated toll remains higher than COVID-19′s both in the United States and globally.

"I'm hopeful we will come out of this and it will be just another chapter in history," Hanna Wilson says.

Martha Wilson says her mother-in-law survived illness from the 1918 flu pandemic and lived a long life.

"So that was one generation, polio was another generation, COVID's another," she says. "I think they happened so far apart that we'd forgotten that these things do happen. I think COVID caught us by surprise.

"And now Hanna and her generation will be maybe more aware when something else comes along."

In this Oct. 28, 1956, file photo, Elvis Presley receives a Salk polio vaccine shot in New York City from Dr. Harold Fuerst. At right is Dr. Leona Baumgartner, commissioner of the New York City health department. (AP Photo/File)

Credit: Uncredited

Polio in the U.S.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, before vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year.
U.S. deaths peaked at 3,145 in 1952.
Outbreaks led to quarantines and travel restrictions.
Soon after vaccines became widely available, American cases and death tolls plummeted to hundreds a year, then dozens in the 1960s.
By 1979, polio was eradicated in the United States.

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