Talk:Vaccines
"Polio was virtually unknown before the end of the 19th century. Although the disease was first noted in 1789, only isolated cases surfaced until the first epidemic struck a village in France in 1885. From then on, polio gathered strength; there were epidemics in North America from the 1890s, Scandinavia from the early 1900s and the UK, Africa, Australia over the following 40 years. Scientists now blame this sudden upsurge on better sanitation, which prevented babies coming into contact with the virus while they still enjoyed maternal immunity."
"...outlandish causes, including cats, blueberries, milk, sugar and Italian immigrants. Sales of ice-cream plummeted during the sugar scare; 70,000 cats were massacred during the 1916 panic in New York.
Polio (poliomyelitis) mainly affects children under 5 years of age. 1 in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis.
Cases due to wild poliovirus have decreased by over 99% since 1988, from an estimated 350 000 cases then, to 33 (1) reported cases in 2018.
World Health Organization "As long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of contracting polio. Failure to eradicate polio from these last remaining strongholds could result in as many as 200 000 new cases every year, within 10 years, all over the world."
"... most famous victim, President Franklin D Roosevelt, who was paralysed by polio in 1921, Americans raised millions of dollars in campaigns such as the March of Dimes. With scant concern for tact, fundraisers staged "Cripples Dances" and screened a film entitled The Crippler.
Poliomyelitis was named in 1847 when the characteristic inflammation of grey matter in the spinal cord was first seen using a microscope (polio is Greek for grey; myelos for spinal cord) but scientific understanding advanced slowly thereafter. In 1908, Karl Landsteiner, a Viennese pathologist, demonstrated that polio must be caused by a virus but it took five more decades to identify that virus because of a series of "blind alleys, red herrings and charlatans".
One microbiologist manipulated statistics as late as 1954 in his campaign to persuade people that polio was caused by bacteria. Another scientist, backed by his boss at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, claimed to have identified the polio virus in some "globoid bodies" in 1913 and diverted medicine down the wrong track for two decades, until the objects were revealed as harmless globules of fat. Stubbornly insistent, despite numerous studies to the contrary, that the polio virus travelled from the nose into the brain, the Rockefeller team funded pointless research, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of laboratory animals and trialled useless nasal sprays on children, before finally accepting 30 years later that the virus reaches the central nervous system from the gut.
In the meantime, millions of patients died or were paralysed. These were the real heroes, as Williams elegantly illustrates in personal stories of children who suffered agonising lumbar punctures and spent years in hospitals where parents were allowed to visit only once a month.
"It was clear early on that the key to defeating polio was an effective vaccine." Science and nature books Paralysed with Fear: The Story of Polio by Gareth Williams – review The history of polio and its treatment is one of dead ends, missed opportunities and downright skulduggery
"In about 0.5 percent of cases there is muscle weakness resulting in an inability to move."
"The disease is preventable with the polio vaccine; however, multiple doses are required for it to be effective." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio