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Commentary: Recalling the polio pandemics

Politicians, doctors, researchers combined to fight this scourge too
Dabbs Frank
Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author. File photo/MVP Staff

From 1949 to1959, a series of polio pandemics swept across Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

The pandemics killed or paralyzed more than 20,000 Canadian children.

Alberta and Manitoba were the hardest-hit provinces.

This was the first pandemic experience of my generation, the post-war baby boomers, and was far deadlier than COVID­­ –19.

In Alberta, surviving polio victims were ordered sterilized by the provincial Eugenics Board.

In some provinces, child orphans disabled by polio were warehoused in mental institutions until adulthood because of the stigma of adopting a cripple.

Polio was a summer epidemic and the prevention was a mandatory afternoon nap presided over by watchful mothers.

The polio virus can infect people of any age, however the largest number of victims were children, earning polio the medical name of "infantile paralysis."

Polio and its crippling effects had been known since prehistory, but global polio pandemics became common in the 20th century.

An early medical breakthrough was the use of space age-looking iron lungs, invented in the 19th century to treat respiratory failure caused by coal gas poisoning.

The lungs supported human breathing by acting as mechanical diaphragms.

The first victims saved by this device were an eight-year-old Boston girl in 1930 and a 12-year-old Scottish girl in 1934. Both were near death from polio-induced respiratory failure.

When placed in iron lungs, both girls recovered in minutes.

Subsequently, volunteer ironworkers helped doctors and hospitals build their own lungs.

On Jan. 3, 1938, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to raise money for polio research.

Roosevelt had been crippled by polio when he was 39 and was wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life.

The president was well-informed about the urgent need for polio research, so started a mail-in campaign that saw thousands of envelopes each day arrive at the White House. The envelopes contained nickels, dimes, quarters sent from children to the president for polio research.

In 1949, to support research for a cure for the polio virus, Canadian mothers joined the Marching Mothers, going door-to-door collecting donations of 'just a dime' to donate for research for a polio cure.

In 1951, the Canadian Foundation for Poliomyelitis started the March of Dimes. Funds raised went to support research into the cure for polio.

In 1955, a polio vaccine created by scientist Jonas Salk of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, passed test trials.

The Canadian government ordered tens of thousands of the vaccines.

They were produced in several labs, including the Connaught Research Lab at the University of Toronto.

In a moment of political courage, Canadian Minister of Health and Welfare Paul Martin Sr. continued to fund the Salk vaccine when a similar vaccine in a California lab failed field tests and other North American governments abandoned polio vaccine funding for a year.

Not only did Canadian children benefit from early vaccination, but Paul Martin became a driving force for the Canadian system of public hospitals and, later, medicare.

Salk and his university did not patent his vaccine, although it would have made him very wealthy. They chose instead to allow drug makers free use of the discovery for the children of North America.

Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.

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