When I was 8 or 9 years old, every time we drove past a particular house just outside Humboldt, Mom ordered the car’s windows rolled up. A kid who lived there had polio and she feared the virus might be airborne.
In the 1950s polio was scary, because it mostly gripped children and in severe cases led to having to spend time — often weeks or months — in an iron lung. Hospital wards were filled with polio victims at the height of outbreaks in the 1940s and 1950s.
The iron lungs helped a person breathe when muscle control had been lost or the process of breathing was too much for the patient’s physical ability.
Thirty years ago, with Rotary International at the forefront, efforts began to eradicate polio, through worldwide provision of vaccine. The project has been extremely successful.
Now, like a bolt out of the blue, polio is making a comeback, and in countries that had been free of the affliction, including Syria and Iraq.
That each of those countries is gripped by civil war or lawlessness, makes it harder to contain polio’s spread. Emergency polio situations also have cropped up in other Asia, Middle Eastern and African nations.
While the outbreak is minuscule in comparison to the planet’s population — 68 documented cases this year compared to 24 at the same time a year ago — it needs to be dealt with immediately through ongoing vaccinations and containing those affected so they don’t carry the virus elsewhere.
The disease is compatible with water and the virus has been found in sewer systems.
The world was on the cusp of becoming polio-free when the latest cases were identified.
With cost of the eradication program being nearly $1 billion a year, some want to walk away.
But, giving the dreaded virus a foothold is wrong. A handful of cases today, when ignored, quickly could spread.
