The polio epidemic (part I)
By John Marshall
Fear hardens its grip on people when a disease unwinds and begins to claim children. Schools have begun to reopen among the currents of a covid pandemic. In counties in the American south, hundreds of students and dozens of teachers have been infected. What will happen in Kansas?
A school year begins, and institutions that once inspired learning become places that incubate dread. No matter all the precautions, worry for children and fear of spreading disease is with us.
It’s not the first time. In 1918, a bulletin from the Kansas Board of Health took special note:
“Symptoms of mild cases do not vary much from the symptoms of the ordinary sicknesses of childhood; but a combination of fever, vomiting, headache, constipation and drowsiness, especially if the child is irritable when awakened, should make one very suspicious and should cause one to send for a physician.”
Not many did, then. Flu-like symptoms were part of any childhood. By the time paralysis set in, it was too late.
That notice from the Board of Health was about a new threat: “Epidemic Poliomyelitis.”
In the decades to follow, it would become the universal fear of every parent. Polio would hold a nation hostage for decades, crippling and killing indiscriminately. For more than two generations, families across America shuddered, especially through July, August, September and October, the months when polio was most likely to strike.
Today the covid plague takes lives and ruins the living. As a school year opens, the virus threatens to enwrap the youngest generation. Covid and polio are distinct and separate tragedies, but they each have presented a deep terror to parents and families and communities.
Polio was a great tide of fever – clinical for the victims, psychological for those who feared for them. It swelled and receded but was never in check. For five decades, this disease came in waves and left Kansas and the nation in a grisly wake of grief.
The state first began to keep records of the effects of polio in 1908. For the next 20 years, 1,600 Kansas cases were reported; 30 percent (487) resulted in death.
The first big epidemic was in 1930,with 694 cases and 64 deaths.
Ninety percent of the victims were 19 years old or younger; or, 77 percent were 14 and under; 60 percent were nine or younger and half of them were less than four years old.
The pattern was constant, the percentages never changed, Polio killed babies, crippled infants and children, devastated families and terrorized communities. There were few, if any, real survivors. Once infected, the outcome was death or paralysis, the extent usually measured in grades from the chin down.
Later, the actual polio virus was discovered; then another, and another. Three polio viruses, called “wild,” were identified. Any or all of these viruses entered the body and chewed at the brain. The type and extent of paralysis depended on which part of the brain had been attacked and how much was destroyed.
Chest paralysis, for example, likely meant death that came quickly in the early days. Later, the “iron lung” was available; polio victims of chest-down paralysis were placed in the iron lung, a gruesome tube that hissed and groaned as the air pressure inside squeezed the patient’s chest to expel air from the lungs, then allowed the lungs to fill with air only to squeeze them again.
Others lost the use of their arms or legs or both, and they were in the thousands in Kansas and hundreds of thousands across America.
In the great epidemic of 1943, 761 cases were reported in Kansas and 66 died. In 1946, 1,068 polio cases and 93 deaths; in1949, 726 cases, 60 deaths.
In 1952, 1,721 Kansans were struck by polio and 69 died. The alarm in Kansas involved a ratio of one case of polio for every thousand population. More than 40,000 persons across the country were stricken. In the first five years of the 1950s, 4,300 were stricken and more than 200 died.
Polio had been a parent’s special terror for decades. Every year babies were dying, children were crippled. Young adults were left to recover their lives in wheel chairs or on crutches and in braces. The saddest were the children left to die, or live, in an iron lung.
(Next: more plague, then Salk and Sabin)
