The story about the fight against polio is instructive by Peggy Boyer Long

Fifty summers ago, the poliomyelitis virus was scaring the dickens out of every parent in the country.

The disease, which spreads through contact with contaminated feces, can cripple and kill adults and children alike. But it brought special terrors to mothers and fathers. The public swimming pool was out of the question. As for inoculations, however limited the protection, there was no question. Life in an iron lung seemed an all-too-real alternative.

Later reports put the panic in perspective. "How many cases make an epidemic?" Wilfrid Sheed asked in his profile of Dr. Jonas Salk for Time magazine in March of 1999. "Survivors of the great polio plagues of the 1940s and '50s will never believe that in the U.S. the average toll in those years was 'only' 1 victim out of every 5,000 people."

For parents, though, that was one too many. But then, remember, this was the World War II generation, already accustomed to mobilizing against any enemy. And winning. Even the name given to the fundraising effort for vaccine research had a military ring: The March of Dimes. And Americans turned, perhaps instinctively, to Salk, the virologist who had beaten back the flu for the army during the overseas engagement.

This isn't mere musty history, though. The battle against polio is still instructive, especially now, as state officials decide whether Illinois children must get the shot that wards off chickenpox. The move would add one more to the 18 required inoculations against nine diseases, Kristy Kennedy notes in "Vaccination vacillation," beginning on page 24.

This issue has become controversial. But in the summer of 1953, Macon County parents were grateful for any chance at preventing a dread disease. Fourteen cases of polio had been reported in the county, three of them resulting in death, three in paralysis. Local officials, with federal help, organized inoculation centers and 21,000 children got the gamma globulin shot, at the time the only known, though limited, protection against severe polio.

That was the year before Salk began field trials with nearly two million schoolchildren. His vaccine was declared 90 percent safe, but, in 1955, a bad batch infected 250 children with polio. Eleven died.

Still Americans pressed on. And in 1961, the American Medical Association endorsed Dr. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine. Today, both vaccines are given in alternating cycles. Though the polio virus is still a killer elsewhere on the globe, it's no longer a worry in this country. There hasn't been a case of paralytic polio in Illinois since 1983.

The story of the search for a polio vaccine says much about politics, of course, as well as the clash of scientific egos. What is more compelling, though, is what it says about us. It's hard not to be struck by the public's will to mobilize, by the willingness to take risks. We really did believe the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

Illinois Issues September 2000 | 4 ---