Polio Gave Boston Area Final Blow
By JAY LINDSAY, Associated Press Writer
BOSTON - Lynne Fraser remembers the neighborhood teenager who gave her polio, and maybe even when it happened. She was 4 years old in 1955 when she sat on his lap at her kitchen table and they playfully wrestled.
Weeks later, the boy was breathing only with the help of an iron lung and she was at Children's Hospital in Boston, lying in a metal crib among sandbags that kept her paralyzed limbs in place. She recalls straining to hear her father's footsteps in the hallway as he approached the room of crying children.
"I would know his footsteps if I heard them in the hallway now because you looked forward to it all day," said Fraser.
Fraser was one of hundreds of people treated for polio during an epidemic that shook the Boston area during the sweltering heat of the summer of 1955. Mothers forbade children to go to public places and hospitals were so jammed that doctors had to treat patients in their cars. More than 2,200 cases were reported statewide in a 10-week period, with more than 600 in the city of Boston alone.
It was one of the last gasps of the debilitating disease, which in its worst form infects the brain and spinal column and causes severe muscle damage, paralysis and death.
Broad distribution of the polio vaccine, approved by the government on April 12, 1955, would all but wipe out polio virus around the nation. But 50 years later, its survivors are still feeling its effects, and memories of that summer remain vivid for caretakers.
"You'd come into work in the morning and you'd see (lines outside the hospital) and say, 'Oh my word,'" said Claire McCarthy, a 22-year-old physical therapist at Children's in 1955. "You knew you were in the middle of something."
Polio epidemics occurred annually in various areas of the country from about 1916 on, and there's no definitive explanation why they moved from one region to another, said Daniel Wilson, a history professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and a polio survivor.
Boston's epidemic was no worse than any other city's, Wilson said, but added, "What makes the Boston epidemic unique is it comes after the vaccine is available."
The vaccine, developed by Dr. Jonas Salk, did not have widespread distribution immediately. The vaccine was costly and difficult to manufacture, which slowed production. Some people wouldn't get the vaccine because they didn't trust it to work, and doubts were magnified by a bad early batch that actually gave polio to about 200 people.
In Boston, polio patients were filling any available hospital room by July, when 460 cases were reported in the state, the worst on record for that month. People lined up outside Children's Hospital for blocks, and police were dispatched to make sure no one tried to force their way to the front.
Boston became a place to avoid. That August, 250 kids from Pawtucket, R.I., declined a fraternal organization's invitation to attend a Red Sox game after a warning by their city's health director.
The newspapers of the day displayed a mix of messages, with Boston's health commissioner proclaiming, "This is not an epidemic" in August while at the same time cautioning parents not to bring their children into Boston.
Dr. William Berenberg of Children's Hospital, in an interview for an ongoing polio oral history project sponsored by the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, called the polio hysteria in Boston "beyond description."
"Anybody who had a kid that was not feeling well... in the minds of the parents they had polio until proven otherwise," he said
Berenberg recalled using a floodlight to check patients in the line of cars.
"We'd look in the car and if the kid was playing, looked happy and mobile, he stayed in line," he said. "But the ones who were obviously in distress... we would give a card to so they could go up to the head of the line."
The 4-year-old Fraser didn't go to the hospital until after she'd spent a few days laid out on her dining room table. Her parents put her there in hopes that the flat surface would help prevent the damaging muscle contractions that come with polio.
"I remember the panic and confusion," Fraser said. "People were coming in to me like I was being waked."
Fraser was placed in quarantine in a hospital for days, away from her parents, with her arms and legs immobilized by both the disease and sandbags.
She remembers the fear and fitful sleeping amid the crying and the hissing "Ka-Chee" sound of the nearby iron lungs, body-sized chambers that literally breathed for polio patients who'd been placed inside. Even today, the smell of steaming hot wool, which nurses placed on her muscles to keep them loose, is still unpleasant to her.
Fraser recovered and was able to walk relatively normally, though she could not lift her left leg and is unable to work because of the disease. She's also had a cane since she broke her ankle in the early 1980s, wears a back brace and is starting to the feel the effects of "post-polio syndrome," the breakdown of muscles later in life.
She's resigned to eventually being forced to use a crutch and has a metaphysical view of her suffering during the summer of 1955 as the price she paid for her three kids to be healthy.
Fraser takes pride in surviving polio and learning to live with her handicaps but the fact the vaccine still isn't available or accepted in some parts of the world pains her.
"Not one person should have to go through that again," Fraser said.
History of Polio Traced in D.C. Exhibit
By CARL HARTMAN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Devastating outbreaks of "infantile paralysis," the disease that crippled 39-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, panicked many American parents of the mid-1900s until Jonas Salk announced a successful vaccine in 1955. Most victims were small children
The National Museum of American History is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the announcement with a yearlong exhibit opening Tuesday called "Whatever Happened to Polio?"
The answer to the question is that polio is still with us. Though the last new U.S. case was reported in 1979, 39 older Americans still need the "iron lung" that encases all but their heads to cope with weakness in breathing. They have been told recently that spare parts could not be made any more. They were urged to find other means of help such as portable respirators, said Michele Kling, head of media relations for the March if Dimes.
In 1959, 1,200 polio victims were using iron lungs. Visitors to the exhibit can put an arm into one and feel the pressure changes that help victims to breathe. The March of Dimes still cares for people who use them, but its work is now mainly on other childhood ills.
"I was only 5 at the time of the announcement," said Dr. Jonathan Salk, a psychiatrist who is the youngest of Jonas Salk's three sons. "There was no more problem. Father wanted us all vaccinated."
In 1962 a vaccine developed by Dr. Albert B. Sabin, using a live, weakened virus to combat the poliop virus, replaced the Salk vaccine, which was harder to use and more expensive.
Today in Nigeria, where some Muslim clerics ran an 11-month campaign against vaccination, denouncing it as an American plot, the number of new cases more than doubled last year to 789. Early figures this year show a decline.
"India is a great challenge because of the sheer number of babies," said William T. Sergeant, chairman of the International PolioPlus Committee." An intensive campaign lowered the Indian figure for 2004.
On display for the American History exhibit will be Roosevelt's leg braces, which enabled him to stand to make speeches as he renewed his political life. Also on hand are an iron lung, a syringe that Salk used in clinical trials a half-century ago, and a sculptor's three-dimensional model of the polio virus that looks like a basketball with a bumpy surface. The bronze model is 7 million times the size of the actual virus, visible only through an electronic microscope.
A British doctor described polio symptoms more than two centuries ago, but it wasn't until 1908 that a virus was found to be the cause. In 1916, there were 9,000 cases in New York City alone. Five years later, Roosevelt caught the virus while on vacation at Campobello Island in Canada, just months after an unsuccessful campaign as the Democratic nominee for vice president.
Roosevelt fought the disease for the rest of his life. He almost never mentioned it in public and usually managed to hide his use of a wheelchair — even during his 12 years as president. A statue of him in a wheelchair is part of the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington.
Though much has been learned about polio, scientists still puzzle over why one member of a family can contract a serious case of the virus while others are not affected. Most people who catch the virus recover after only a few comparatively minor symptoms.
"If we could find out how just how the virus affects nerve cells we could both help polio sufferers and learn more about other diseases," said Richard Murphy, president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.
On the Net:
"What Happened to Polio?": http://americanhistory.si.edu/polio
Polio, Boston 1955. - sjećanja bolesnice
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