The Polio Crusade

My mother had polio. She got it from sharing an all day sucker. She had some difficulty with her left side all her life.

When I was at university (1990s) there were two people in my dorm who walked with both crutches and calipers due to polio.

Anti-vaxxers have short memories.

Africa has done an amazing job of getting 95% of the continent vaccinated against wild polio. I saw a news item last year about sufferers who travelled to remote villages to show the impact of polio and encourage vaccination. The linked article is about the achievement.

Only Afganistan and Pakistan still have wild polio

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-53887947

Coincidentally, I listened to a podcast last night called 'The Man in the Iron Lung'. It was the story of someone who contracted polio aged 6, and is now 74 and one of the last people in the world still using an iron lung. 
His story was fascinating - the summer he contracted it, his initial illness and his life since. They also spoke of the polio vaccine, and how successful the vaccination campaign back then was, mainly because so many children died or were permanently affected. They also commented on anti-vaxxers, and linked their rise to the success of the polio vaccine, and others against common childhood illnesses - we are now so far from the times when these diseases spread through communities that we have forgotten how devastating they could be. 

The podcast was from The Guardian 'Long Reads' series, and dates back to June last year, but still very topical.

I was born with Scoliosis and the leg problems I also had were attributed to that.
My parents like all others at that time were not told the full story and it wasn`t until many years later as an adult that a Doctor asked me about when I had had Polio, he was surprised when I didn`t seem to know what he was talking about.
To this day I do not know the full details of how and when I contracted Polio but a few years ago I was diagnosed with PPS (Post Polio Syndrome) which interests Doctors I meet as it is not common  to come across PPS.
I am very much against anti-vaxers and Polio is a lifelong threat to health as I well know.
By the way I was vaccinated but probably had already caught Polio. I did wear a caliper (leg brace) as a child.

I used to be the home nurse for a woman with an iron lung due to polio.

At work we discuss how polio will be back in the US because of the anti-vaxxers.
Coincidentally the idiots in my state have introduced a bill to ban any business or school from requiring vaccines. 🤦‍♀️

^^^ THIS. My Grandpa had polio when my mother was little, and walked with a limp and a cane the rest of his life. Mom said they weren't sure he was ever going to walk again at all. But my older sister is, in recent years, becoming more and more stridently anti-vaccine. Go figure.

I will look for the PBS show. Their episodes on the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic were very good, too.

(eta:  my DH bitc%es about the covid vaccine being *required* for entry to places as 'the mark of the beast' <HUGE eye roll> and says, "I was never barred from going anywhere due to a vaccine before!"  I said "YEAH, you WERE-  you had to have all your vaccines to GO TO SCHOOL.  You just don't REMEMBER that."  He didn't have much to say after that.)  

I have my anti-Vaxx family member on ignore on FB for this exact reason. Her daughter starts K in the fall and she's already looking into homeschooling as she's "anti system". She truly believes that all of this is done by "big pharma" to keep you sick and spending money on medications that in turn lead to needing new meds with all the money going back to "big pharma". There is a great deal of comparison to yellow stars and businesses asking for proof of vaccines. I think there is a seed of a real discussion around privacy vs the public good in there somewhere, but when it's surrounded by rhetoric and noise it gets drowned out.

Um... No people who had TB were put away in TB Sanitariums, some forever, some until cured.

There was also quarantine for several diseases. And they hung a sign on your front door for all to see. They did it when I had scarlet fever, my grandma was not happy.

My Aunt was born in 1927 and was a dancer from a young age in Jacksonville, FL. After HS, she traveled to NYC to tryout for Rockettes and it is believed that she contracted Polio while there. She was paralyzed for a few months and she went to Warm Springs, GA for treatment. Eventually, she gained her mobility back, and wore a brace on her left leg her entire life, progressing to a cane and scooter in her later years.

She never danced again, but ran a dance studio for many years. Was mother of 9 and her and my uncle ran a tight ship. She to suffered from PPS and participated in some studies through the years.

My city had a TB Sanitarium that is still standing and turned into businesses. The one in the city next to us was torn down.

I'm a '50s child and I don't recall parents or anyone else for that matter being anti-vax during those days. What I recall is that when a school or doctor said such and such is needed, everyone obeyed. I'm trying to remember, but when did this anti-vax thing really hit its stride?

2000 or later... basically when the babies born in the 1980-90s became parents. They have been the second generation to not experience the death and life altering disabilities from viruses. Children born in the 1960s had the examples of older people (grandparents and parents) who had been left with disabilities. So we had some real life examples of what it was so important to have our kids vaccinated. But our children came into a world where the US was not experiencing large outbreaks of viruses that had terrified generations of parents before them. So when they became parents all that felt like a hoax or not possible. They felt safe to not vaccinate their kids because those diseases weren't widely circulating in the US.