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Post-Polio Syndrome: |
Living with Polio: |
Polio is, counterintuitively, "a disease of cleanliness." Until modern hygiene and sanitation kicked in, newborns picked up the virus from their mothers, but in mild doses that produced the antibodies needed for lifelong inoculation. Thus, the cleaner, the riskier; the better, the worse.
A hospital doctor stuck a huge needle right into Roosk's spine. It hurt, hurt, hurt. Then came three long days in a men's ward where, as Roosk remembers it, no one spoke. His parents wrote chalkboard signs that he read through two walls of glass. Did he want ice cream? No. A newspaper? He shook no again. That's when they got really scared.
The fiftieth anniversary of the Salk vaccine in 2005 has brought forth a raft of books about polio, four of which are sampled here. David Oshinsky writes the definitive history of the war against polio in America. Daniel Wilson traces the experience of polio from beginning to end. Marc Shell subjects polio to a cultural-studies examination of the disease and of all the books, movies, and assorted cultural artifacts directly or obliquely related to it. Julie Silver offers practical advice on how to manage the post-polio syndrome.
Oshinsky, a University of Texas historian, traces the dramatic race to find a polio vaccine. Amid a large cast of characters, FDR and his associate at law, Basil O'Connor, play major roles. In the late 1940s, their March of Dimes tried house-to-house solicitations: "Turn On Your Porch Light! Help Fight Polio Tonight!" The Mothers' March on Polio, 2,300 strong by 1950, became "one of the indelible images of postwar America." Between 1951 and 1955, the NFIP raised $250 million. The money funded research and defrayed the medical costs of needy patients, with eighty percent qualifying.
Roosk's family was asked to pay a grand total of 24 dollars. Roosk's father vowed to repay the March of Dimes for the full bill.
Rival researchers Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin raced to create a workable vaccine. Salk, then at the University of Pittsburgh, got there first. The Salk vaccine trials of 1954 involved more than 1.3 million children, one of the largest clinical tests ever undertaken. The favorable outside evaluation announced in 1955 set off huge celebrations. Car horns honked; church bells rang out; banner headlines screamed, "Polio Is Conquered." The moment had come to re-punctuate "Oh no, polio" as "Oh, no polio." Salk appeared on Time magazine's cover and at President Eisenhower's White House. He accepted all too gladly the public's desire for a singular hero. At his coming-out news conference, Salk said not a word about the dedication of the many assistants ranging behind him onstage. Julius Youngner, for one, never forgot and never forgave. Fifty years later, he observed that Salk did nothing else of scientific note: "Being small-minded myself, I take some pleasure in that. Schadenfreude, it's called."
Roosk used to sell his blood for its antibodies, which went into a stopgap pre-vaccine serum. Salk put Roosk out of business.
If Salk was a glory-hog, Sabin was worse: "arrogant, egotistical, and cruel." He sneered at Salk's lionization: "You could go into the kitchen and do what he did." Salk's was a killed-virus vaccine. Sabin, who had been working at the University of Cincinnati on a live-virus vaccine, did not finish first because it is harder to attenuate live virus than to kill it. Sabin was the professionals' favorite. But Salk was the people's choice—until one batch of his vaccine went out with some live virus and caused five children to die. Salk is named among history's most famous scientists, but Sabin's vaccine triumphed, its victory cinched by its oral delivery system. By 1961, only a thousand new cases in the United States were reported.
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