 
Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread of fecal matter, or sometimes fecally contaminated water or food. The virus multiplies in the intestine. Initial symptoms include fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness of the neck, and pain in the limbs. One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. Among those paralysed, 5% to 10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized. 
The polio virus destroys nerve cells in the spinal cord, causing muscle wasting and loose, flopping limbs, particularly the legs. It can lead to irreversible paralysis. Polio mainly affects children under 5 years of age. However, anyone of any age who is unvaccinated can contract the disease. Children who seem to fully recover from the disease can develop new muscle pain, weakness, or paralysis as adults, 15 to 40 years later. This is called post-polio syndrome. There is no cure for polio. Polio can be prevented. But first, some history. Polio epidemics hit parts of Canada in waves during the twentieth century, peaking in the 1950's. The year 1953 was a particularly bad year, with 9,000 cases and 500 deaths nationally. In the U,S. in 1952 there were 20,000 cases of polio-induced paralysis. Keep in mind that the population of Canada then was just 15 million; in today's population of 38 million the epidemic would have affected 23,000 people and killed almost 1300. The population of the U.S. then was just 153 million; in today's population of 332 million, there would have been 44,000 cases. During the polio outbreaks, schools, playgrounds and movie theatres were closed in parts of the country. Public health officials in some communities gave daily briefings on new cases and recoveries. Families of the infected were quarantined. Nurses were recruited out of retirement to help with the large numbers of patients, while health officials and governments scrambled for much-needed equipment. The treatment used to keep the sickest patients alive was extreme. They were placed inside a device called an 'iron lung' that created a vacuum around their body, with only their head showing. A device called a bellows sucked air in and out, forcing the chest up and down to help them breathe. 
 At one point, the Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto was building iron lungs in the basement. The Royal Canadian Air Force flew mercy missions, bringing iron lungs to desperately-short communities. In Winnipeg, one hospital had 90. Polio was predictable, coming in 'invasions' summer after summer. Immunizations were the great turning point in the battle against polio. First came the Salk vaccine in the 1950s, which was developed with the help of Connaught Laboratories, then part of the University of Toronto. This was followed by the Sabin vaccine in the 1960s. Polio has been eradicated in North America thanks to vaccines, one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. In the 21st century, there have been just three known instances of polio, all thought to be imported. More than 20 million people are able to walk today who would otherwise have been paralysed. An estimated 1.5 million childhood deaths have been prevented. Polio vaccine, given multiple times, can protect a child for life. Why this history lesson? Infectious diseases are reappearing, spreading more widely and persisting longer than they have in generations. This is largely because one thing that we can do to reliably prevent an outbreak of infectious disease ... get vaccinated ... is the one thing millions of people in North America are failing to do. Recent data has revealed that childhood vaccination rates have declined worldwide since 2020 – the biggest backslide in 30 years. For the first time since the early 1990s, life-expectancy is actually dropping for many groups in the U.S. A fifth of Americans have refused the Covid vaccines for themselves or their children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just 65 percent of residents of some counties outside New York City, Orange and Rockland Counties, for example, are vaccinated for polio, compared to a nationwide average of 80 percent. It should come as no surprise that when polio reappeared in the United States recently ... the first U.S. outbreak since 1979 ... the first diagnosed case was from Rockland. It seems like we're returning to that dark time before vaccines. “The extent to which people are currently rejecting scientific findings, and expertise of all kinds, is scary,” said Mary Fissell, an historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Whole generations have assumed that dangerous infectious diseases would never, or could never, return. Misinformation on social media has made that problem worse, with many of the most strident anti-vaxxers actually blaming vaccines for the very diseases the vaccines prevent! It's as if we've forgotten just how dangerous and frightening the world was before vaccines. There were no antibiotics and no vaccines. When someone got sick, there was not a whole lot you could do. Life expectancy was a lot lower than it is today. Large percentages of children died in childbirth or lived only a few years. Yet there are people who seem to be trying to return us to these dark ages. A couple of generations of North American children have now lived largely without risk of dying from infectious disease, or even getting seriously ill. Polio was probably the last big killer. In the 19th and 20th centuries, with rapid advancements in public health, communication, and vaccines, we managed to consistently prevent, contain or even eradicate diseases like smallpox and polio, that in previous centuries killed millions. Nearly a dozen cases of measles have been reported in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Georgia recently. International travel, along with declining global vaccination rates, is probably behind this. Measles was eliminated in North America in 2002, after zero virus spread for more than a year, largely due to a highly effective vaccination campaign. Before the measles vaccination program, about 3 million to 4 million people got the virus every year, and about 400 to 500 died. Most people haven't seen a case of measles, and don't really appreciate how severe the illness can be. Read about how people in Ireland are getting measles again. Ireland's Chief Medical Officer Professor Breda Smyth said she was "very concerned" there was a "high risk" of a measles outbreak in the country and urged people to take up the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines". Read the story here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68237808 If an unvaccinated person goes to a country where a disease is still common, becomes infected and brings it back to Canada or the US, they can spread the virus to other unvaccinated people. If the disease gets introduced into communities where vaccination rates are low, we could see a resurgence of the disease. Today's trends are ominous. The trends ... fewer vaccinations, more infectious diseases ... aren’t encouraging. They seem to be heading us back to a time before vaccines, when we got sick more often, died younger and tried (and mostly failed) to contain viral outbreaks by locking people in their homes. Mistrust of science is at an all-time high, despite the fact that it has enabled us to stay largely free of infectious disease and live longer than ever. There’s no single thing anyone can do to fix our pandemic problems. But there are lots of things everyone can do to help. Trust experts. Don’t spread fake news or conspiracy theories. And, most importantly, get vaccinated, and encourage friends and family to get vaccinated. Not just for Covid, but for every disease for which there’s a safe and effective vaccine. In a first for vaccine development, two COVID-19 vaccines were created, evaluated and authorized for emergency use in just under a year. Despite this fast timeline, these vaccines went through the appropriate clinical trials, just like other vaccines before. A true global emergency paired with early application of substantial resources made this possible. Other coronaviruses had been studied for 50 years; researchers already knew that the spike protein could be targeted by a vaccine, which gave them a goal to work toward immediately. Large scale vaccine clinical trials were organized quickly using networks established in the pursuit of an HIV vaccine. People enrolled quickly due to widespread public interest. Covid-19 symptoms resembled the flu, but with more dire consequences: As of December 2023, there have been 103 million U.S. cases, with just over 1 million deaths. In Canada, there were almost 5 million cases, with just over 50,000 deaths. Both show an approximate 1% mortality rate. As long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of contracting polio. Failure to eradicate polio from the few remaining strongholds in the Third World could result in a global resurgence of the disease. Transmission of poliovirus is continuing in areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a few countries in Africa. |