Pandemics in my Lifetime
May 8, 2020
Don Rogers
I still have memories of 1952, when I was just eleven years old. At that time there were many diseases for which there was no cure or vaccine. Now and then diphtheria would break out in some community, and although there was a serum that would help stop the spread and reduce fatalities, it wasn’t a sure thing. Most of us were aware that President Truman had had a bout with diphtheria, which put him in the hospital for weeks.
Measles was endemic all over the country, and mothers were always worried that one of their own children would catch it and be left blind or mentally compromised, if they survived.
I caught measles one year as a child, and when my mother heard me complain about the light hurting my eyes, she isolated me in the front porch/bedroom and draped blankets over the windows. When my brother Bill soon showed the same symptoms, he got put in the same room in the other bunk bed, where we stayed for about a week until the fever broke and we started feeling better.
I don’t remember if the county health people tacked a red quarantine notice on our door, but I know that was common back then to try to prevent the disease from spreading rampant through the community.
The very worst fear for every parent was called Infantile Paralysis, better known as Polio. It was so common and devastating that every one knew someone who had been affected by it. It came on suddenly, with a fever and body aches. There was no treatment that worked. There were many spas that touted their healing waters, and there was a famous treatment center in Australia run by Sister Kenny which used hot and cold compresses and physical therapy to try and stave off total paralysis or death, but as I remember, there were a lot of people who came back crippled for life.
A lot of rumors abounded about how the disease might spread, and one of the suspects was swimming. When an epidemic was sweeping over the country, beaches were closed, and many swimming pools were empty or closed. I remember the public pool in Merced, CA, closed one summer, interrupting our Red Cross swimming classes, and when it reopened the smell of chlorine was so strong it burned your throat and made your eyes water. It also turned blonde hair green.
Not very many people realized that President Franklin Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down and could not walk a step by himself. The press was much more polite back then, and never published pictures of him in his wheelchair at the White House, and never got close enough with the cameras to show how he stiffened his arms and was carried to the lectern between his son and an aide before he gave a speech, holding onto the sides of the lectern with the steel braces on his legs locked under him to hold him up.
I personally knew several people who had survived polio. One was a woman named Thelma Gallno. I remember her wedding - the first wedding that I remember - i believe in 1948. I have a little brother who may have been named after the man she married - Johnny Gallno. He was a lumberjack, and always had great stories about the mountains and the woods to tell us kids. He was a hero to us.
Thelma had one leg paralyzed and one just partially paralyzed, so that with steel braces she could walk by swinging her bad leg forward as she pivoted on the other leg. She loved music, and played the accordion when the church singing group went to visit shut-ins on Saturday afternoons.
One of the shut-ins was Mrs. Alcorn, who was in an iron lung when I first met her. She had been paralyzed from the neck down by polio, and depended on the machine to breath for her. She was totally encased inside the tank, except for her head, which was on a shelf on one end, with her neck sealed somehow so the pressure changes in the tank could push and pull air through her lungs. Ironically, we went to sing and cheer her up, but invariably she was so happy and cheerful that she did more for us than we did for her.
As years passed, and we continued to come and sing for her, the iron lung was replaced by a tilting bed, which was driven by a crank on a drive unit underneath. As her body was tilted fore and aft, her diaphragm was displaced by her internal organs and alternately pushed and pulled on her lungs so she could breath.
In time, she also acquired a respirator, which she could bite and clamp in her mouth, and could replace all the cumbersome equipment that had kept her alive until then. The mouthpiece was clipped to the bed in such a way that she could push it out and talk and then take it back and get another lung full of air.
One of my school mates in the little Merced Adventist school out on “W” drive was Terry Sutherland. I didn’t know that he had had polio and survived with almost nothing to show for it, until we were playing soccer on the playground and both of us ran for the ball at the same time. It was a tie. Neither of us saw the other until we crashed headlong into each other. I was knocked kind of silly, with my head throbbing, and Terry was holding his leg, which obviously hurt badly.
The principal of the school took us both to the hospital ER, where we both were examined and x-rayed. No broken bones were found, but that was when I found that Terry had one skinny leg. It had been slightly withered by polio, but he overcame a limp, and normally you would never have known.
If memory serves, all school children got the new Salk polio vaccine about 1957. It was given by injection, and when it was my turn I bawled and hollered and my mother had to help the nurse hold me for my shot. Yeah, I was a big crybaby, and made a complete fool of myself. I still am ashamed to mention it. Of course, my little brother, Bill, seeing how I acted, walked right up and took the shot without a whimper, and he may have grinned at me. Not sure about that, though. I still had tears in my eyes.
A couple of years later, a new oral vaccine came out, called the Sabin vaccine. Since it was supposed to be even more effective, we all went down and got it. It was on a sugar cube, and went down pretty easy. I think we had to go back for three of them, like a month apart.
At nearly the same time another oral vaccine became available, called the Cox vaccine.
Since it’s been a long time, and my memory is hazy, I did some research and found newspaper stories and articles from websites that tell of the long struggle to find a good polio vaccine.
I remember the next year I was surprised to not see the March of Dimes campaign. Every year they had distributed cards with slots for children to save up dimes in, all going to research for a polio vaccine. It had been a big deal every year, and now that there was a vaccine, they didn’t need the March of Dimes anymore. They eventually found another cause - Birth Defects - but it has been much lower profile ever since.
Following are quotes from the sources I found:
According to a front page story in the (Merced) Sun-Star on Sept. 5, 1952, “only 12 cases of polio have been reported in Merced County this year.”
That same story noted that “only” one polio death had been reported in the county during that period.
The next day, the Sun-Star provided a more national perspective to the epidemic. It reported that 3,559 new cases of polio were reported in just the previous week, eclipsing the previous peak in 1949.
From the Merced Sun-Star, March 12, 2011 Writers Mike Altamore and Tim O’neill.
In 1947, (Dr. Jonas) Salk was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the Pittsburg School of Medicine. With funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis — now known as the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation — he began to develop the techniques that would lead to a vaccine to wipe out the most frightening scourge of the time: paralytic poliomyelitis.
Contrary to the era’s prevailing scientific opinion, Salk believed his vaccine, composed of “killed” polio virus, could immunize without risk of infecting the patient. Salk administered the vaccine to volunteers who had not had polio, including himself, his lab scientist, his wife and their children. All developed anti-polio antibodies and experienced no negative reactions to the vaccine.
In 1954, national testing began on one million children, ages six to nine, who became known as the polio pioneers. On April 12, 1955, the results were announced: the vaccine was safe and effective. In the two years before the vaccine was widely available, the average number of polio cases in the U.S. was more than 45,000. By 1962, that number dropped to 910. Hailed as a miracle worker, Salk never patented the vaccine or had earned any money from his discovery, preferring it be distributed as widely as possible.
In 1942, (Dr. H. R.) Cox became head of the Virus and Rickettsial Research Department at Lederle’s Laboratories in New York. At that time public health attention focused on finding a vaccine for polio. Cox was one of many researchers competing to find a breakthrough, which is generally credited to Jonas Salk (1952). Although Cox’s egg technique was in widespread use by 1943, it had not been successful for polio.
In 1947, John Franklin Enders and others had demonstrated that monkey tissue provided a suitable medium to grow the virus in the lab. Salk employed the Enders method, incubating the virus using Rhesus monkey kidneys and testicles.
Cox eschewed this technique because of the danger monkey virus represented. In 1952 Cox reported that he had grown the Lansing strain of polio virus in fertile hen’s eggs, and in 1961 he announced an oral polio vaccine.
Meanwhile, human trials of Albert Sabin’s successful oral vaccine had begun in1957 and it would be licensed for general use in1961.
The Rotary Club of Merced is still raising funds to fight to eradicate polio in other countries. They have an iron lung to show in the campaign rallies. Only us old folk remember them now, and that’s good.
