Message from a past epidemic
A first-person account how polio in the 1950s informs our situation today
Like everyone else, I’m eagerly awaiting a turn-around in the course of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. I’m keeping social distance, angry at how many people aren’t, concerned about the elderly who are at-risk in nursing homes (I’m a senior myself) and sorry for my kids and their spouses — parents who have to manage the isolation with their babes day after day and a big adjustment to life indoors, while staying wary of exposure outdoors.
Most everyone is hoping it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, but that wish is too late for me and millions of Americans born before the late-1950s. I was a school child when the last widespread killer virus rampaged across the United States. That was the polio epidemic, which earned notoriety in 1916 and lasted until a dramatic decline some 40 years later. What brought it to an end is the same thing that most likely will bring this epidemic to an end: a vaccine.
In the interim though, in 2020 we have the ability to institute something we couldn’t when polio swept the nation in the ’50s: widespread testing for the virus.
One of the most destructive polio outbreaks spread throughout the summer of 1952. Polio thrived in the summertime and it mostly affected grade-school kids. The worst cases either killed people by constricting their lungs or paralyzed people, often their legs. As opposed to our modern knowledge of coronavirus transmission, how polio spread wasn’t generally understood. But much like during today’s pandemic, social isolation was considered the best way to avoid infection. Worried parents warned us to keep out of swimming pools, movie theaters and summer camps.
General worry grew to a panic level as the summer of ’52 wore on. As dangerous as polio was, it had never really struck close to home, and now it did. We had seen pictures of people in iron lungs — grim first-generation ventilators — and then our friend, Mike, was suddenly in one. Two girls vanished from my older sister’s friend group, and returned months later, wearing braces encircling their atrophied legs. Warnings to keep away from gatherings became demands to stay close to home. By the end of the year, nearly 60,000 children across the country were infected with the virus, thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died.
By now, most countries, including the U.S., have successfully eradicated polio through broad use of the vaccine, which was introduced in trials in 1955. Scientific studies have shown repeatedly that vaccines are the best way to squelch any communicable disease, including polio, and until the vaccination and pharmaceutical advances of recent decades, what we’re now calling “social distancing” was the only way to ensure you wouldn’t get infected. Until the past few decades, we’ve had neither the medical know-how nor the distribution methods to test for a disease such as COVID-19 on a mass scale — and clearly we still have problems with the process.
The development of the polio vaccine had its seeds many years before its development, when polio’s most famous victim, then-future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, contracted the disease in 1921 at age 39. His was a serious case with many critical stages, and he came close to death on more than one occasion. He recovered and although he never hid his condition, he concealed the extent of his paralysis from the public. By agreement, the press did not write about it and photographers did not record him on crutches or in his wheelchair.
Over the years, FDR established a private treatment center, and invested in research to develop a vaccine and treatment methods. A large source of funds was the March of Dimes, an organization with many creative ways to raise money. Among them was the march children had at school every year. We saved pennies and on March of Dimes Day, we lined up and walked in a circle around the classroom, dropping a penny in the jar each time we passed it and sat down when we ran out. The winner won a prize.
Money from the March of Dimes supported a young medical researcher, Dr. Jonas Salk, who opened up a lab at the University of Pittsburgh in 1947. By 1952, he had a vaccine ready to test. The next year, he conducted a trial with 2 million children. In 1955, the vaccine was declared a success and administered broadly in the United States. As a result, incidents fell 85–90 percent from 1957 to 1959. Dr. Albert Sabin, Salk’s longtime rival, introduced his oral vaccine in 1961. It gradually became the vaccine of choice because it was cheaper, provided wider protection, and was easier to administer. By 1979, the U.S. was declared polio-free.
A final note on polio’s advance and retreat. Unlike coronavirus, which has spread rapidly across the country, polio appeared in localized outbreaks — sometimes small and sometimes big, including New York City in 1918, Los Angeles in the early 50’s, and the largest, nationally, in multiple locations in 1952. It’s fair to assume that had testing for the virus been an option in those places and times, many lives could have been saved, and many people could have been spared attachment to an iron lung or a life of relying on aids to walk.
The times were different. Television was in its infancy, not yet a national presence or networked between cities. Radio, newspapers and magazines still served as the major sources of news. Information about how serious the outbreak was, and ways for individuals to manage it, was sporadic and delayed. Instant and continuous news coverage as we have today did not exist.
Urban density, which currently provides massive petri dishes for the spread of COVID-19, was limited to a few cities. Just like today, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and a handful of other coastal cities were large, but most of the big metropolitan areas in the west and south today had only a few hundred thousand people in the 1950s. Spot fires of polio didn’t jump from one site to another, in contrast to the nationwide coronavirus wildfire today.
People traveled in the 1950s, just not as much, not as often, and for not as many reasons. Nationwide travel wasn’t an assumed fact of life. The two factors that made for the growth in travel came after the polio epidemic was tamed: the interstate highway system was approved and funded in 1956, with construction starting a year or two later. Commercial jet travel did not seriously begin until 1958. If an epidemic needs large numbers of people carrying the infection rapidly from place to place, our planes, trains and automobiles did not have the critical mass to move polio at speed across the country.
Polio, like the coronavirus, is a respiratory disease. In its time, it was just as feared, just as difficult to stop by human intervention, just as devoid of treatment options, and for half a century just as difficult to prevent. But to make matters worse, it was more mysterious. No one had any idea they, or their neighbors, or their loved ones had it until it was too late, because testing a broad swath of the population was not an option. Even when someone contracted polio, from whom or from where was a mystery.
Eventually, it was stopped virtually everywhere — but it took a vaccine.
We’re already hearing the specialists at the daily press conference mention more frequently the need for work on a safe and effective vaccine. We’ll hear more. That’s what polio taught us, and that’s where, from my experience, our hope lies. Whatever the course of the disease today, however long it lasts, a vaccine will stop it in its tracks.
But until then, as opposed to 70-some years ago, we have another tool to protect us — comprehensive testing that can help us determine public policy regarding when and where it’s safe to reopen our society — or keep safer at home. Until we can get to a vaccine, mass testing is our best bet to save lives and keep our society at some semblance of normalcy.
