The polio epidemic (part II)
By John Marshall
The summer months and early fall were the worst for fear of polio. People were told to avoid crowds, children were warned not to go swimming. There was widespread suspicion and alarm; precautions were taken everywhere. The polio virus preyed especially on children.
In an interview many years ago, Virginia Lockhart, a 44-year veteran with the Kansas Health Department, told me what polio had been like in another era when hopes for a cure were frail and thoughts of a vaccine were distant. “I remember the hospitals that had turned whole floors into polio wards, and I remember seeing the adults out in the halls, terrified and helpless.”
Lockhart remembered the parents of children with polio. “Sometimes I’d see them outside in the hospital yard, straining to see up at the windows, looking at the children who could get to a window. Sometimes they’d see one of their own. It was awful. Quarantine.”
From before the state began keeping records, in 1908, through the 1950s, poliomyelitis (“infantile paralysis”) claimed hundreds of thousands of Americans, including tens of thousands in Kansas. It was a special plague. Polio split parent and child, it shredded families – the same, shared terror that strikes with today’s covid.
Today, as then, we worry for a vaccine.
The polio years were crushing. There was a time, in the early ’50s, of near hopelessness. The disease seemed ceaseless and brought constant fear, with surges of greater tragedy in the epidemics of 1930, 1943, 1946, 1949. And in 1952, more than 40,000 Americans, most of them children, were stricken. In Kansas, according to health department records, 1,721 were stricken; 69 died. That was the middle of a five-year epidemic in which more than 4,300 Kansans were stricken and 213 died.
Ninety percent of the victims were 19 years old or younger; Half were less than 4 years old. Few “survivors” would return to normal lives. Polio presented two alternatives, death or paralysis, with the disability varying only in extent and severity.
Then, hope. Dr. Jonas Salk found a vaccine that worked. In 1954, the Kansas Board of Health and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis conducted polio vaccine trials in Shawnee, Sedgwick and Johnson Counties. A year later, the Board of Health was charged to administer polio vaccine with help from Congress (the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Assistance Act of 1955).
By July 1956, the Health Department estimated that 85 percent of Kansas children ages 4-9 had received one or more injections (boosters were necessary) of polio vaccine. Kansas had one of the nation’s best records in protecting the age group most susceptible to polio. From 1954 through 1956, annual polio cases had dropped from 751 (31 deaths) to 185 (19 deaths).
But science and politics rarely walk hand-in-hand. The Vaccine Assistance Act subsidized child immunizations only for two years; people could buy inoculations but the poor, without subsidies, were left out.
And the Salk vaccine, although wondrous, did not kill the polio virus; it only protected the nervous system against invasion. Although inoculated, “healthy” people could still carry and transmit the virus. With many unable to afford the Salk vaccine and so many still carrying the virus, the disease took hold, again, in 1959: 188 cases,10 deaths.
But that was the last severe outbreak. Dr. Albert Sabin in Cincinnati developed an oral vaccine made of living polioviruses that offered higher protection in the blood and – another breakthrough – prevented any poliovirus from taking hold and multiplying in the intestinal tract; it prevented people from carrying the disease.
Salk’s vaccine had stalled polio. Sabin’s prevented it. Drunk from a cup or dropped on a sugar cube, it was easy to take.
The Kansas Board of Health in 1962 launched an education and immunization program, the largest single-purpose campaign of any agency in state history. The oral polio vaccine program was to educate and immunize every Kansan, starting with children. The project involved radio and TV announcements, recorded commercials and jingles, taking photos, preparing publicity kits, coordinating the activities of 95 local publicity committees, visits at every radio and television station and most of the newspaper editors in the state. Even Matt Dillon and Doc Adams of Gunsmoke were involved.
In the first week, beginning Dec. 2, nearly one million Kansans received Type I vaccine, lining up at schools, churches, town halls, clinics, courthouses and hospitals. Slightly fewer received vaccine for Type II and III viruses. This was the first successful statewide immunization program in America.
It took decades to find the polio virus, then five years to tame it, and another two years to put it away. What will tame covid, and what must we endure to find out?
