Polio Braggadocio.
Tell me, do you hesitate to pick up a beautiful feather, discarded by an escaping pheasant? Do you hear your Mother’s voice as you bend down to touch it? I can tell your age by your answer.
As children, those of us denominated as ‘war babies’ knew that the greatest threat to continuing childhood was not the old man in the sweet shop with the wandering hands, but that feather. Not just the white feather of cowardice, nor the multi-coloured feather of the bird of paradise, but all feathers, any feather.
A feather could see your youthful limbs shackled in callipers at best; at worst, your entire body encased in the ‘iron lung’, a fearsome sounding machine that none of us had seen, but quaked in our boots at the mere mention of.
A feather could carry the Polio virus decimating American cities across the ocean, and drop innocently into your path in grimy Salford, enticing you to pick it up and ruin your entire life. A feather could turn you into the shuffling, limping, callipered creature that conducted your physics lessons, or the wheelchair bound figure of even the most powerful man on earth – Franklin Roosevelt. Alfred’s Hitchcok’s film of the Birds carried a resonance that those who watch it today would not begin to understand. Those feathers might come to you! Surround you! Arghh!
That today, earnest young people under the age of 30 couldn’t even tell you what Polio is, and cheerfully flood forums like Mumsnet with apparently educated reasons why their child will never have a vaccine, is generally credited to Jonas Salk, who invented a vaccine against the disease in 1952, which by 1994 had eradicated at least the ‘wild poliovirus’ in the Americas. There were still another two version of the virus at large in the world. As was the ‘wild poliovirus’.
There are many eulogies to Jonas Salk, most claiming that his greatest gift to mankind was not just that he invented the vaccine, but that he declined a patent and ‘gave’ it to the world. Slight hyperbole – he had already been advised by lawyers that it would not be possible to patent the vaccine; had he tried to, the request would have been denied. That issue of media hype shouldn’t cloud the gratitude later generations should accord the man.
More so today – for a couple of weeks ago, the Global Commission for the Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication announced that the ‘wild poliovirus’ had quite simply been eradicated from the world. It is no more – though there are still two other versions at large.
Although Polio had theoretically been eradicated from Syria in 1999, 11 million people fleeing their homes has put the on-going vaccination programme that was keeping the virus under control way down the list of priorities – in April of this year there were 100 known cases of Polio inside Syria – and unknown thousands of ‘transmitters’ (reckoned to be 1,000 for every known victim) amongst those fleeing across Europe.
The media is amazingly silent regarding either the success of eradicating ‘wild polio virus’, surely on a par with eradicating small pox; or that one of the worst outbreaks in the past decade of Polio occurred amongst a population currently on the move across Europe. Most of the confirmed cases occurred in the rebel held areas of Syria, the very places where vaccination programmes were first disrupted.
A front page story in The Times today was hailing the discovery of a new and previously unknown poem by T.S.Elliot about a cat – further expanded inside the paper accompanied by pictures of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’ production. This is important stuff.
No mention of the remarkable achievement of the World Health Organisation in eradicating at least some of the Polio threat. No mention of the threat heading towards Europe.
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November 3, 2015 at 10:48 am -
We, the members of the Global Commission for the Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication, conclude today, 20th September 2015, that indigenous wild poliovirus Type 2 has been eradicated worldwide.
Worldwide? https://ourchiampion.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/6.jpg
Don’t get me wrong, when the WHO isn’t off on Anti-Smoker Putin Sponsored Junkets and Bunfights instead of tackling nasty little problems like ebola, then they can do an amazing job…’heroic’ even. But the above wording has a horrible ring of ‘Famous Last Words’ to it.
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November 3, 2015 at 10:58 am -
The Polio outbreak of the late 40s, much like TB at the same time, tends to be forgotten about now. I suppose Ian Dury was perhaps the most famous person that Polio had left its mark on in childhood. He said the clinic he was sent to employed what would now be regarded as a ‘tough love’ policy, whereby if you fell over you had to get up without any assistance. Hard to imagine children being treated like that now, but it certainly toughened him up. My mother (born 1943) had a cousin who was struck down by it, somebody I met just the once when she was in her sixties; she still had a slight stoop, but she was a tough old bird. The unsentimental and (to modern sensibilities) severe manner in which those children were taught to overcome the affliction certainly paid off.
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November 3, 2015 at 1:30 pm -
TV cook Mary Berry also had polio as a child, I believe, spending three months in hospital.
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November 3, 2015 at 2:06 pm -
It was Ian Dury who popped into my mind too. I’d not realised until quite recently that his song Spasticus Autisticus, which was featured at the London Paralympics, was written as a protest against the International Year of Disabled People.
At the risk of turning everything here back toward Sir Jimmy Savile, I think Jim was another who benefitted from, and understood, the tough love school of treatment. That seems to have been a big part of Ludwig Gutmann’s philosophy too and, of course, he was the man who made Stoke Mandeville, and (arguably) started the Paralympic movement. SJS was able to use the International Year of Disabled People to persuade the government to chip in for the building of the spinal injuries unit at Stoke. I suspect there’s some kind of irony in there somewhere…
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November 3, 2015 at 7:30 pm -
My Mum had it in the 40s. She was 12 and they put her in a women’s ward. She learned a lot about the world that year !
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November 3, 2015 at 11:16 am -
Just one of the unintended consequences of the movement of vast numbers of peoples. This will not end well. A strange phrase popped into my head. as if from no where. It just appeared. Perhaps because I have been watching that BBC2 show, “The Last Kingdom” It was:
“The vast majority of law abiding Vikings.” -
November 3, 2015 at 1:01 pm -
I thought there had been a couple of case in east London relatively recently.
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November 3, 2015 at 3:08 pm -
TB was eliminated in Britain in the 60s, and has made a comeback in this country in the lungs of immigrants. Now Polio? Rabid Muslims think that vaccination is a Western plot. But DDT which could have reduced the Malaria threat was declared unsafe for our feathered friends and was outlawed. It was extremely unsafe for mosquitos! Fortunately Smallpox seems to be truly gone.
If I was in charge of such things I would have all immigrants screened for TB and Polio, and treated if either were discovered, and then put the costs, along with all the NHS and social care costs of migrants against the Overseas aid budget. I’d also give massive compensation to any aboriginal (not the bloody didgeridoo playing variety!) inhabitant of these islands that was infected, and that would come out of the Overseas aid budget too.
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November 3, 2015 at 3:16 pm -
I well remember the kids with polio, and the 1950’s vaccinations.
Not just polio, though, I think of the next door family of my childhood: mother died from TB, three sons suffered it too. And the childhood routine of mumps, measles, whooping cough & chicken pox, how would todays childminded families cope? I also recall having a smallpox jab to get a visa for the USA in the early 1970s. Very unpleasant reaction.
Perhaps the anti- vaccination crowd need a forced education on some of the health nasties that have only so recently been tamed. A garden’s only weed free while it’s maintained.-
November 3, 2015 at 4:04 pm -
I have some sympathy with the anti-vaccination crowd, at least if they are anti-the-polio-vaccination. Couple in the downstairs flat from us the last place we lived in the Fatherland, had a teenage son…or rather they didn’t, what they had was a vegetable in human form, a paralysed baby in adult flavour. It was heart breaking. He had been a perfectly healthy normal baby until the vaccination. I notice in the link AR supplies to the Cert Comm that they do mention the ‘very rare’ paralysis reaction to one of the vaccines. It may be very rare but it happens. Is the cost in human misery worth it? To ‘lose’ one to save many? Yes without doubt but I would not condemn anyone who felt otherwise.
Maybe I am abit ‘touchy’ but as we had our handicapped Kid it was poignant. We would see ‘Basti’ in his adult sized full body wheelchair buggy-thing dribbling and making baby noises, lights on but no one home and we realised just how fortunate we had been to ‘only’ have a ‘normal’ spastic Kid, who would (and has) grow up to live his own independent life -last year he took flying lessons as well as car ones and spend the long Norfolk winter evenings doing things like Krav Maga (no I don’t know how that one ‘works’ either but he was training with a 9mm Glock the other day).
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November 3, 2015 at 3:54 pm -
The fear of polio was certainly rife in my 1950s childhood, injections being considered mandatory, not optional. However, I have no recollection of the feather-threat – maybe such news never reached the uneducated North.
It may be argued that the current (and future) unsustainable growth in world population has much to do with those advances in medicine addressing otherwise fatal childhood ailments, not so much in the developed world, but elsewhere. It always strikes me that, when I see charities begging for cash to fund clean water supplies in the Third World (noble though that notion superficially may be), its real effect is to enable more kids to survive who otherwise wouldn’t, kids who then grow up and very soon go on to have their own multiple kids, for whom there will then be even less adequate supplies of food, jobs, homes and futures, mostly in lands devoid of stable government and basis infrastructure. Rather that eliminating one problem, we are blindly encouraging and exacerbating a future one. The tide of immigrants heading for the wealthy West may be an early indication of these consequences, albeit being nominally blamed on short-term conflict.
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November 3, 2015 at 5:07 pm -
Yes indeed. It’s a great pity that the development of effective contraception lagged so far behind other advances in medicine. Apparently we are heading for a world population of nine billions. What effect is such growth having on the genetic health of the human race?
When I was a child, you had to develop an effective immune response, through exposure to the sort of diseases children are now vaccinated against, or you died, as my young cousin did (of TB), and as I would have done had my immune system been unable to defeat diphtheria. I sometimes wonder how our much-vaccinated population today would cope if widely exposed to some unfamiliar, deadly disease (ebola?) for which no prophylactic is available. No doubt the thought has also occurred to our homegrown potential mass murderers.
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November 3, 2015 at 6:09 pm -
The whole point of vaccination is to strengthen your immune system – a dead form of the infection is introduced to your immune system, which then remembers it for future reference. Think of it as showing a dead rat to a young terrier: “This is what you go after, boy!”
In any case, death isn’t the only result of these diseases; they can leave survivors with plenty of damage. Measles, for instance, can in some case leave bits of itself lying dormant in the brain, to be reactivated with devastating – and ultimately fatal – results four or five years later.
I myself was seriously ill with measles as a young baby; my mother was terrified, as she had lost a younger brother to measles years before. I recovered, but with damage to one retina – and I already had mildly buggered sight from a congenital condition. Having never known anything else I’ve little idea of just how buggered my sight now is, but I do know that nobody would be insane enough to let me get behind the wheel of a car; even after a lifetime of practicing avoiding them, I still sometimes walk into walls and lamp-posts.I get damm angry with those mothers who insist that nobody’s going to stick a HUGE SHARP HORRID NEEDLE into their precious snowflake. My parents’ generation remembered when disease killed and injured – on vaccination days, the queues of mothers and children at the clinic stretched out into the streets.
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November 3, 2015 at 7:43 pm -
My problem with vaccines is that there are too many of them given way too young. In real life our immune systems do not have to react to half a dozen serious diseases at once. Little tots have brand new immune systems and whilst the vaccines may protect them from specific diseases I have seen an enormous rise of serious allergy in the young, from coeliac/asthma/year round hayfever to anaphylaxis from eating lentils. My daughter had a party and she had 4 friends there with epipens! In my day the only things anyone was allergic to were shell fish and bee stings, and that was rare.
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November 4, 2015 at 3:44 pm -
“. In real life our immune systems do not have to react to half a dozen serious diseases at once. ”
I take it that you’ve never seen a toddler drop its dummy on the floor and instantly pick it up and stiff it back into its mouth? Or a baby being sloppily kissed by all its doting grannies and aunties? Or a small child delightedly exchanging salivary juices with a dog? With its very first breath a baby is encountering millions of potentially harmful organisms, yet everybody seems to survive that.
As I said, the organisms in vaccines are dead, inactive, deceased, gorn to the hereafter, as a dodo, off to the happy hunting grounds, pining for the fjords.Etc. All the recipient’s immune system has to do is to with the vaccine is have a sniff and a good look, maybe pick it up and shake it around; then drop it and go back on patrol.
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November 3, 2015 at 8:01 pm -
HUGE SHARP HORRID NEEDLE into their precious snowflake.
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b116/horta/nachspritze_zpsljpiwnta.jpg
Got that this morning from youngest Dwarf Son with the caption “After bad doctor give her a inaction lol” …yes her Daddy is dyslexic.
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November 3, 2015 at 8:07 pm -
Awww, PROUD GRANDPA! She’s soooooo cute!
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November 3, 2015 at 5:08 pm -
I remember the fear of polio in the 50s one of my classmates was struck down but I have no memory of the feathers. My sister in law had polio and spent months in hospital, she still has a slight limp but otherwise recovered well. TB was also quite common, we are very lucky that the vaccines were discovered.
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November 3, 2015 at 8:02 pm -
I have never heard this about feathers, maybe because my mum was a registered children’s nurse? We were always concerned about swans though as they go around breaking your arms with their wings!
Another worry as a child was going blind by getting ‘Tide’ suds in my eyes, a sort of aluminium film was expected to grow across the whole eye. I can only think it was a combination of the fact that we used Tide clothes washing powder to wash the dishes, (pre-Squeezy and the like), and that aluminium foil bottle tops were saved in an empty Tide box, no doubt for the ‘blind’ dogs benefit! -
November 3, 2015 at 11:19 pm -
I had Polio as a child. Fortunately it was very mild. It affected my throat and I was unable to eat solid food for a while.Even now 65 years later I
sometimes have difficulty swallowing .I had all the other usual childhood illnesses and remember my sisters getting measles. Our doctor visited
and told my mother to put all four of us in the same room and get the infection over in one go.
I have just heard that the latest advice about Asthma is to allow your children to pet cats and dogs. Why are we now discovering things that our grandparents knew a long time ago. It still seems stupid that we are still urged to buy antiseptic wipes and fluids that kill 99% of all known germs.
Let your kids get mucky, that way the immune system is built up naturally.-
November 4, 2015 at 6:45 am -
“It still seems stupid that we are still urged to buy antiseptic wipes and fluids that kill 99% of all known germs.”
I always laugh when those adverts precede the ones for ‘biotic’ yogurt drinks…
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November 4, 2015 at 12:18 am -
Anna has neatly decribed the fear we felt as children in the early 50’s. I still shudder at the mention the Iron Lung . I had a vivid imagination and as kids all we lived for was “playing out” so the thought of spending the rest of your miserable life lying on your back looking at the world through a mirror was truly terrifying. The daughter of neighbours, two years younger than I contracted it and had to wear a caliper. To this day she walks with a limp.
This fear has returned as I now have grandchildren and one of my daughters is adamant that her kids will not be vaccinated. They just have never seen truly serious cases of polio, measles, TB or diptheria which nearly killed me.
My father who served in India and Burma always said that mass imigration would bring back TB to our shores and he was correct. I am deeply fearful of the future.
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November 4, 2015 at 6:43 am -
“Tell me, do you hesitate to pick up a beautiful feather, discarded by an escaping pheasant? Do you hear your Mother’s voice as you bend down to touch it? “
Only if it’s a peacock feather. She thinks they are unlucky if brought indoors.
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November 4, 2015 at 8:42 am -
Never heard the feathers thing, although I am old enough to have had school contemporaries in wheelchairs and calipers because of Polio.
Have some sympathy with the anti-immunisation crowd, because naturally if Tony Blair tells you something is perfectly, completely safe, but refuses to say whether his own children have been “done”, well what you are going to think?
And something must explain the enormous increase in allergies, autism, and other auto-immune conditions over the last couple of decades; it can’t ALL be down to better diagnosis. I had never even heard of autism until about 1980, but now it seems to be almost fashionable.
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November 4, 2015 at 4:36 pm -
” I had never even heard of autism until about 1980″
That’s easy to explain. Although autism was first named in 1908, it referred to a very small set of obvious symptoms, such as withdrawal and voluntary dumbness. Meanwhile all the “odd” kids who didn’t quite fit that description were diagnosed as ESN, sub-normal, cretins, retarded, schizophrenic and so on and dumped in homes, out of sight. But since the 1980s, the definition of autism has been widened and now embraces much of the old diagnoses. When was the last time you heard of a child being diagnosed as retarded, for example? Additionally, many people who were previously seen just as a bit odd or eccentric have now been labelled as having Asperger’s Syndrome – a subset of autism.
As for allergies, yes it’s now become fashionable to have an allergy to something (usually gluten). In nearly all cases, it just means the person once felt a bit ill after eating a pizza or something; the incidence of most medically diagnosed allergies has remained pretty steady. Peanut allergy seems to be the exception and researchers keep coming up with theories to account for it. It could be simply down to the fact that a) the population has grown hugely in the last 50 years, so that there are more allergy diagnoses numerically and b) peanut derivatives, especially the oils, are far more widespread in our food; children who would never have encountered peanuts in previous generations are now exposed to it almost from birth.-
November 5, 2015 at 3:43 pm -
Not convinced.
ESN, sub-normal, cretins, retarded – all of those were euphemisms for Mongolism afaik, and Mongolism is so well-defined that the incidence of it will hardly have changed (except maybe as a result of the modern fashion for over-age mothers).
Peanut butter was in every larder I ever saw when I was a child; perhaps we and our friends were all unusual.
You’re right about “Aspergers”. It’s almost a fashion statement nowadays if some member of your family is “on the spectrum”. Most of them are just ordinary introverts – that’s why it is a spectrum; we’re obsessed with labels and clinical diagnosis, not unconnected, I believe, with the fact that state schools can access extra funding for every “special needs” child on the roll.
I still think the incidence of food allergies is up by orders of magnitude since the 1950’s, and I don’t think you can hand-wave that away quite so easily.
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November 5, 2015 at 5:56 pm -
Don’t forget the extra money parents or more usually parent gets if children have ADS or autism, I know a few who have had their kid diagnosed with Attention Deficiet Syndrome and find it profitable,
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November 5, 2015 at 6:18 pm -
Until not so very long ago I would have shared your POV. Then Granddaughter1 came along and from the age of 2 or so started to show signs of ‘something not being right’. Having had a ‘proper’ disabled (spastic) kid myself I was a little skeptical of all these ‘fashionable’ ‘Alphabet Soup’ syndromes-especially ones in small children.GDD? Autism Spectrum? *you could have coloured me unconvinced* But as Granddaughter grew towards her third summer it became clear even to me that ‘she woon roight’ as her Norfolk speaking Mama would say. Grandaughter1 is now 5, at school, a ‘normal’ school and almost has control of her bowels….she still doesn’t eat anything other than yogurt, still has no ‘danger awareness’ (she is quite happy to play with traffic or wander off with strangers) and , most telling of all in my book, she won’t eat McDonalds (she’s defect,send her back for a replacement!)
Yes her Mama gets DLA for her and it does help …keeps Granddaughter in pull up nappies and Mullers anyways. Having seen how her single mum has had to fight to get any kind of treatment for her daughter, the abuse this single mom has had to take from teachers and nursery staff, the reactions of other parents and the unhelpfulness of a lot of ‘health’ professionals who come out with things like (and this quite recently) ‘you just need to make mealtimes fun’ I doubt any parent of a ‘spectrum’ kid feels it is ‘profitable’. They have to battle like crazy to get that diagnosis….the money is almost inconsequential.
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November 5, 2015 at 6:56 pm -
I don’t doubt there are genuine cases and your granddaughter certainly has problems but I do know a couple of kids who seem to be hyperactive and that’s seems to be enough for a diagnoses these days. Autism is different and I am not sure mainstream school is always right for autistic children. My friend chose to send her son to a special school which he loved and improved enough to go to mainstream school for secondary education where he is doing well and his talent for music is encouraged. His parents felt that at a young age he could not have coped with other children too young to understand his problems. I hope your granddaughter flourishes wherever she goes.
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November 4, 2015 at 8:45 am -
And of course, you won’t see any mention in the MSM of the risks of deadly disease spreading by mass migration – even to hint at such a thing would be racist.
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November 4, 2015 at 10:41 pm -
I heard an interesting programme on the radio a few months ago about antibiotics. Most of us are aware that the bugs can adapt to antibiotics faster than we can produce new ones.
Apparently not only do the target bacteria become resistant they can pass that resistance onto other bacteria. Similarly benign bacteria can pass on acquired resistance to target bacteria.
This means that it is important to control the disposal of antibiotics, dumping them into a water course can cause bacteria ‘in the wild’ to become resistant. They, in turn, can pass that resistance onto disease-causing bacteria. Because of poor control in places like India most of the population now carry antibiotic resistant bacteria in their bodies. Consequently there must be an increased risk that immigrants/visitors from these countries may not only bring in diseases into the UK but antibiotic-resistant variants too.
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November 5, 2015 at 8:22 am -
Despite its many faults, our own health system can at least make efforts to limit the prescribing of antibiotics, and hence the slow growth of resistant bacteria: the same cannot be said for far more populous states.
In China, for example, antibiotics are freely bought over the counter in pharmacies, meaning that every Chinese with the available cash (i.e. most of the city-folk) now purchases and uses antibiotics for almost every ailment, often quite inappropriately. Given our government’s relaxation of visa conditions for Chinese visitors (because they spend a lot), an unintended consequence may be the increased prevalence of drug-resistant bacteria here very quickly. I’m sure they’ve thought it through ……..
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