When I first visited India in 2005, there were still 66 cases of polio in the country. But when I flew to India last January, I landed in a country that had been polio-free for six years. India reached the milestone of polio elimination in 2014, along with the rest of the World Health Organization’s Southeast Asia region.
In fact, the only explanation for why I visited India to celebrate National Immunization Days in India, an initiative launched in 1995 through the Indian government with Rotary International and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Rotary took me there to see how a country of 1.4 billion people mobilized network leaders, fitness workers, local volunteers, and Rotary club members around the world to administer oral polio vaccine to each and every child under the age of five in the country.
Sometimes four doses of vaccine are enough to protect young people from poliovirus, but those living in areas where polio is appearing, warm-weather spaces and poor health situations want additional doses for complete protection, so that even vaccinated youth get the vaccine. National Immunization Days. The only two countries where wild polio cases still occur are Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a neighbor of India, Pakistan in particular may be a possible source of imported cases.
However, even there, the concept of polio, the disease itself, seemed far away. I saw evidence of the destruction of polio in some of the Indians I met on the street, who doubted or were absent members, and visited a polio service not far from Delhi. But the ever-present concern of a disease that can devastate my network like polio did in the United States in the 1950s, the same concern that led impatient parents to get vaccinated in the first few days of vaccination, was nothing I had personally. Experienced.
The irony, of course, is that I would do it very soon. Even when I returned home in late January, a new coronavirus that didn’t even have a call quietly made its way around the world. Months later, I wouldn’t know how lucky I was not to leave Covid on my return. I fix My memories of my recent stay in India, especially for national polio vaccination, are inevitably similar to the joy of sinking into the largest pandemic. in a century.
So it’s no wonder I’m wondering what parallels can exist between the current epidemic and the polio epidemic my parents experienced. Talking to other people familiar with those years, I found that looking to compare you was more confusing than expected.
Fear and uncertainty
Some facets are predictably similar, namely the anxiety and uncertainty that accompany a serious but invisible risk lurking in a network that in the past felt safe.
“There was anxiety,” said Anne Lee Hussey, who was 17 months old when she contracted polio in 1955, a few months after the vaccine became available. Although his four older siblings developed a fever that was probably due to polio, Hussey was the only one to expand the paralysis.
“Friends would come by the house when he finished school and were never allowed to see his friends during the summer,” he said. “The parks were closed, the pools were closed, they didn’t see their friends again before they went back to school, and there was a seat that was empty because someone didn’t come back.”
As with Covid-19, not everyone with polio has symptoms, however, these “silent carriers” can still transmit the virus to others. And polio lacked a cure.
“Namely, I can sense the fact that they didn’t know how to treat polio,” Hussey said. “They learned on the fly, and that’s what we do with Covid-19.”
Another similarity is the heartbreaking isolation experienced by patients in poor health.
“I’ve been in the hospital for five months, and I don’t forget the mendacity in my bed and go out the window and see my brother on the other side, but they wouldn’t let him in,” Hussey said. And he’s concerned about the possibility of some other similarity: the long-term effects of the disease we don’t yet know. “In the days when other people had polio, they didn’t know about post-polio syndrome,” he said, referring to the disease that can affect up to 40% of polio survivors decades after infection.
Peter Salk, who was 10 when his father Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, lived in the countryside the years and can’t forget the summer closures. But he doesn’t forget the summer when his circle of relatives stopped going to Lake Erie as they had in the last seven years.
“My parents just didn’t need to take us because of polio,” said Salk, now president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation and professor of infectious diseases and epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. And he remembered the stories of other people who couldn’t make it to summer camp or film.
It was the only cinema in the city to close, which is clearly remembered by James Cherry, MD, an infectious disease pediatrician and a professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. I was in medical school when the vaccine came out, but remember how vital it was when I was younger three miles from town to watch a movie, only to notice that the theater was also closed. It also recalls the closure of swimming pools, as one of the main polio transmission strategies was water.
“Once there was polio, the pools closed,” he says. In Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An American Story, historian David Oshinsky describes how communities in the United States have tried to deal with the invisible threat, adding their ultimate borders, prohibiting trains or buses from stopping or foreigners disembarking.
Today is another world
But these dispersed local measures differ specifically from the state and national closures in March and April that remain in place in many places. And aside from the concern that led to the closure of the local theater over the summer, “There’s nothing like it,” Cherry said of today’s pandemic and beyond the polio epidemics in America. It focused specifically on the viruses themselves: polio was an ancient enterovirus that other people had lived with for millennia, while a new coronavirus is the Covid-19 logo.
The age of the other most vulnerable people also differs, said Stanley Plotkin, MD, a CDC veteran and vaccine developer guilty of the rubella vaccine. With polio, it was basically parents who were terrified of their children, adults can also get polio, but with Covid-19, older adults are at peak risk.
The difference, however, has nothing to do with the virus itself.
“It’s another world, ” said Salk. People today are not used to dealing with infectious diseases as serious as in the 1950s, when almost everyone gets measles, whooping cough, rubella, chickenpox and other diseases. More profoundly, anything has also replaced the way other people think about science, business and government, Salk said. There has been an “evolution of skepticism” that has eroded other people’s confidence.
“There is a certain innocence, in a sense, in the 1950s,” Salk said. He described receiving the polio vaccine, “a massive gift presented through science to the other people in this country who are surely welcome and wanted, but lately we are living in another time. People need a vaccine, but they distrust,” he said. he said, compared to the 1950s, when parents enthusiastically enrolled 1.8 million young people to participate in clinical trials funded almost entirely through personal donations.
Plotkin agreed, pointing out widespread misinformation that has blossomed on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
“I think social media has allowed stupid data and concepts to circulate, which wasn’t so simple in the past,” he said.
Disease epidemics have been a fertile ground for conspiracy theories and far-fetched (or seductive) misconceptions to thrive, and polio epidemics were nothing else: word of mouth referred to everything from cats to ice cream during polio epidemics in the United States. But never before has there been so much false data and conspiracy theories traveling as quickly from other resources as they do today. And this phenomenon now crosses two other major differences: American politics and journalism.
Lack of authority
Cherry expressed frustration with the GOP’s intransigence by failing to detect the truth of the virus for so long and always, in states and communities across the country, without taking the risk seriously enough to take public fitness coverage measures.
Plotkin also became involved in the politicization of the pandemic, especially from the CDC, where Plotkin, an officer in the 1950s, dismissed.
“CDC has been the reliable source of data that everyone will pay attention to, but instead, we have conflicting recommendations from politicians and governors, not to mention the president,” Plotkin said. “When the polio vaccine came out, you didn’t see the Democrats say that Eisenhower is a lie to us, that the vaccine is going to kill us, that kind of thing. I think the mistrust is much, much greater than it was, and that it is because society is so divided.”
He attributes some of this to a replacement in American journalism, a “regrettable loss of objectivity,” he said, where “we have left-wing newspapers and right-wing newspapers reporting things that are critical of him and not objective.” Newspapers and radio news weren’t as partisan as they are today, he said. But the biggest challenge is a lack of leadership and trust.
“We want other people that the public trusts, regardless of their political affiliation, and we don’t have that,” Plotkin said. “People don’t settle for the recommendation of the same source. It is content with the recommendation of reliable resources and they forget the resources they do not trust.”
Is the unity of the afterlife imaginable today?
The confluence of unbridled misinformation, the political department, and a confusing media landscape makes it incredibly difficult for Americans to pay attention to the most important lesson the polio age can offer: everyone will have to work in a combination toward an unusual purpose of defeating such a wonderful enemy.
“The most important thing that moves me, on the hunt for the experience of polio, is the unity that existed in the mind of the public,” Salk said. “Essentially, it’s a shared experience. People were terrified; polio was deeply rooted in the public consciousness.”
This has allowed the Ten Cents March to increase the budget needed to fund polio vaccine trials. “It was the American public that seized the opportunity,” he said. The April 1955 announcement that the vaccine was effective provoked a jubilation that had been accelerating for years as the public continued to be fascinated by the progress of the vaccine.
At first, Salk thought it would happen again.
“In the early days of closing, I was very pleased and inspired by the other Americans,” he said. “It’s extraordinary to see how other people cooperated, worked together, acted together, tackling this thing that was becoming a critical situation.”
He recalled an article pointing out how many cases were avoided through lockouts around the world and “how common it was that there was never a time in human history when we made as much difference in as many lives as in the first few weeks of the pandemic.” Matrix »
And then “things to make them the ugly head, ” he said. Here came the protesters of the armed closure, the tension to reopen the states before it is safe, the devastating effects of the locks on business and the income of others, the resistance of others to dress in masks, the incorrect information that is unleashed. ..
“It was devastating for me internally to revel in this point of discord,” he said. “Then, even before Memorial Day, I felt bad inside,” knowing how the boxes would start to climb. Salk does not know how it is imaginable to regain America’s sense of unity in the 1950s. “Can you translate that to today?” Asked. It is too simplistic to say that we all deserve to come in combination as we did at the time when today’s hard force “stokes the flames of discord for the purpose of dividing and conquering, breaking the unity of the country, not bringing other people.” combined, ” he said.
Hussey also remembers an America with a more communal mindset, not the “society I” that she sees today, and is baffled by those who will not wear masks. “Please pay attention to scientists and public fitness experts,” he says. “I pray that when the vaccine comes out, other people won’t fight it.”
Plotkin is also involved in the resistance.
“One of my considerations is that once there are vaccines, if a significant number of people are not vaccinated, we will not have the collective immunity effect we get with other vaccines, and that can clearly mean that the virus will continue to circulate. in the United States,” Plotkin said.
This fear may be unwelcome when so many other demanding situations arise (manufacturing, distribution, prioritization of vaccinated), but the general concern many feel about how a vaccine will be obtained is the greatest significant difference between the polio age and today.
But it’s also something that can be changed.
Hussey, a Rotary club member who volunteered in 30 national vaccination days in India, Nigeria, Chad, Somalia, Egypt, Bangladesh and Pakistan, is hopeful. He described the resilience he saw in countries like Africa when he came to run in a combination for public health.
“They are more willing to do so at home, more willing to stick to the orders of doctors because they have experienced more epidemics,” he said.
It is unclear how long the pandemic will last and how long it will last until a safe and effective vaccine is available to anyone who wants it. When we took a look at the era of polio, it was actually a time, with years of concern accumulating, summer after summer, and the mutilated and dead young people who left a constant reminder of their devastation. Perhaps we are asking too much to ask a country as stubborn, varied and independent as the United States to meet just six months after the virus. Perhaps, frustratingly, it will require more suffering.
“Even those few months later, the population is still surprised,” Salk said. “We’re not oriented. We don’t know what we’re going through. Perhaps when the surprise goes away and everyone reluctantly accepts the truth of this disease and what it can do, perhaps, perhaps, history will simply repeat itself. .
I am an independent scientific and multimedia journalist specializing in reports on vaccines, paediatric and maternal health, parenting, public health, health,
I am an independent scientific and multimedia journalist specializing in reports on vaccines, pediatric and maternal health, paternity, public health, intellectual health, medical studies and social sciences. My paintings have been published in The New York Times, NPR, Scientific American, Medscape, Self, The Washington Post, Politico, Everyday Health, Slate, Frontline Medical Communications and elsewhere. He co-wrote The Inshapeed Parent: An evidence-based resource for his son’s first four years with Emily Willingham. I also recently published Vaccination Investigation: The History and Science of Vaccines and have written several science books for children. I write on my blog on evidence-based parenting Red Wine – Applesauce and the Association of Health Journalists, and gave a TEDx Oslo lecture on why parents care about vaccines. I earned my master’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin (also my undergraduate alma mater). Previously, I taught at Bradley University and the best schools in Texas, and occasionally saw my journalism as a form of teaching, helping others perceive science and medical studies and dissipating distortions about vaccines, chemicals, and other misunderstood topics.