Famous poliomyelitis survivors

Wikipedia has an extensive list, from which I've extracted some of the names I recognize:

Alan Alda born 1936 An actor most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H. Alda contracted polio at age seven, during an epidemic. His parents administered a painful treatment, developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny, in which hot woolen blankets were applied to the limbs and the muscles were stretched by massage

Mia Farrow born 1945 An actress who was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 2000, and campaigns in the fight against polio. Farrow collapsed on her ninth birthday and was diagnosed with polio two days later. She was in the hospital for eight months, where an iron lung maintained her breathing.

Gwen Verdon 1925–2000 An actress and dancer on Broadway and in films. Verdon was encouraged to dance by her mother, a dance teacher, as therapy for her polio-afflicted legs.

Johnny Weissmuller 1904–1984 At age nine, Weissmüller contracted polio. At the suggestion of his doctor, he took up swimming to help battle the disease, and he went on to win five Olympic gold medals in the sport during the 1920s.

Arthur C. Clarke 1917–2008 A science-fiction author and inventor. He contracted polio in February 1962, which confined him to bed for months. In 1984, he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, and he spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair.

Judy Collins born 1939 As a child, singer-songwriter Judy Collins spent several months in the hospital recovering from bout with polio. Collins later became a representative for UNICEF and has worked to promote polio vaccination programmes.

Donovan born 1946 Folk singer-songwriter and guitarist Donovan contracted polio... This left him with a limp and feeling excluded. However, he says "I kind of look back on it and think it was positive for me because it made me withdraw from my pals and realise I was different."

Michael Flanders 1922–1975 An actor, broadcaster, and writer and performer of comic songs, often in partnership with Donald Swann. He contracted polio in 1943 while serving in the Royal Navy, and required a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Joni Mitchell born 1943 A musician, songwriter and painter. Mitchell started singing at age nine while in the hospital recovering from polio. Her distinctive sound featured dozens of non-standard guitar tunings, which she developed partly to compensate for a weakened arm.

Itzhak Perlman born 1945 A virtuoso violinist. He contracted polio at the age of four. Perlman requires braces and crutches to walk, and plays the violin seated.

Dinah Shore 1916–1994 A big band singer, actress and talk show host. Shore contracted polio, aged 18 months, which left her right leg crippled. She recovered strength through massage, swimming and tennis.

Neil Young born 1945 A singer-songwriter and guitarist. He caught polio at age five, during the epidemic of 1951.

Mitch McConnell born 1942 A Republican member of the United States Senate from Kentucky and current Senate Minority Leader. He contracted polio at age two resulting in a paralyzed left leg, but eventually recovered with physical therapy.

Robert McNamara 1916–2009 A business executive and former United States Secretary of Defense. Both McNamara and his wife contracted polio in August 1945. He was in the hospital for a couple of months but his wife was badly affected and remained there for nine months. His career change from Harvard professor to the Ford Motor Company was made to pay her hospital bills.

Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945 U.S. President 1933-1945. FDR founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now called the March of Dimes. He spent as much time as he could recuperating from Poliomyelitis in the waters of Warm Springs, Georgia where he founded one of the first rehabilitation facilities for Polio survivors.

Bud Grant born 1927 The long-time former American football head coach of the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League for eighteen seasons. He caught polio as a child, leaving one leg shortened. He was advised to take up sport as therapy.

Jack Nicklaus born 1940 A professional golfer who has won many major golf championships. He caught polio, aged 13. Nicklaus was affected with stiffness, pain and weight loss over two weeks. He recovered without any paralysis but believes he may have post-polio syndrome, which makes his joints sore.

Wilma Rudolph 1940–1994 A track and field athlete, Rudolph was the first American woman to win three gold medals at the Olympic Games. At age four, she contracted polio and lost the use of her left leg. After five years of massage and exercises, she managed to walk again without her leg braces. By the time she was a teenager, Rudolph was faster than the boys in her neighbourhood were. Rudolph won a bronze medal, aged 16, at the 1956 Summer Olympics and three gold medals in the 1960 Summer Olympics.

Frida Kahlo 1907–1954 A painter who was the subject of a 2002 movie starring Salma Hayek. She caught polio, aged six, and spent several months in bed. Kahlo was left with a deformed and shortened right leg.

Dorothea Lange 1895–1965 A photographer and photojournalist most noted for her picture Migrant Mother. She caught polio, aged seven, and was left with a withered right lower leg and a limp. Lang said, "It was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once. I've never gotten over it and am aware of the force and power of it."

Henriette Wyeth 1907–1997 A portrait artist. She caught polio as a child, which crippled her right hand. She compensated by holding the paint brush between her first and second fingers.

Reposted from 2018.

Sheltering Arms Hospital in Minneapolis

October is Polio Awareness Month (because it used to be a seasonal illness peaking in late summer and early autumn), so this is a good time for me to share some memories of my experience with the illness.

In the summer of 1952 I was a normal 6-year-old kid playing outdoors with friends in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  One day I contracted a febrile illness and spent a night moaning in pain from muscle cramps.  The next morning when I tried to get out of bed I fell to the floor because both legs were limp and wouldn't support me.  My mom was an R.N. who knew what was happening, so she and dad drove me to "The Sheltering Arms" institute over on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.  I was admitted to the ward indicated by the yellow arrow on the postcard image embedded above.  The ward had I'm guessing 25-40 beds with maybe some privacy curtains in between, staffed by nurses who had been trained in the Sister Kenny method.

There was no cure for this viral illness, but what she discovered in her early work in Australia was that patients were able to recover some function if the affected muscles were kept active during the illness.  At Sheltering Arms, pairs of nurses would go around the ward pushing a cart with near-boiling water into which they dipped woolen towels which were then applied to children's legs.  The initial application would be painful, then comforting as the heat subsided into warmth, but then they returned over and over again to reapply maximally-hot towels.  When some measure of stability of the illness occurred, there followed intensive physical therapy with bags and socks filled with ball bearings draped over ankles and leg lifts repeated until exhaustion.  

I spent much of my summer in that ward.  As an adult I later learned from my parents that my sister had also come down with polio (in the bulbar form that affected her speech and swallowing), and even my mother was affllicted.  She remembers seeing my father peering through a window on her hospital room door, his face in tears as he coped with three family members simultaneously afflicted.  I eventually wound up with an atrophic right quadriceps but adequate ambulatory function, and a variety of contractures that needed release and even an attempt at tendon transplant at the Mayo in later summers, but I eventually had enough recovery to permit a reasonably normal adult life - unlike so many of my schoolmates who wound up on respirators or in wheelchairs or dead.  This is enough for now; I'll probably add more info in future years updates, in an effort to counteract the horribly medieval mindset of some modern politicians who feel that vaccination is too risky.

Re the postcard above, I should clarify that the window to my ward is open in the photo, because polio was spread by fecal-oral contact, not via aerosolization of the pathogen via cough.  The photo also shows a small ladder leaning against the wall, which parents could use to step up enough to wave hello to their children inside.

For those interested, there are about 15 other posts in TYWKIWDBI in the poliomyelitis category.

Polio was the "autumn ghost"

So named because of its seasonality, poliomyelitis was the cause of worldwide epidemics in the 1950s.  This new book presents a detailed look at the 1952 epidemic (in which I was an unwilling participant) with a focus on its effects in Denmark.

"... until quite recently in medical history, there was no intensive care.  Seventy years ago anyone who struggled to breathe, whose heart gave out, or whose kidneys shut down would be kept comfortable and left to die.  There were no ventilators, no monitors keeping track of vital signs minute to minute, no expertise of nurses and physicians to keep critically ill patients alive, and no dedicated units in hospitals for the care of such patients... This is the story of how we got from 1952 to now."

The story in Denmark begins at Blegdam ["Blei-dahm"] Hospital in Copenhagen, created in the 1860s as a "fever hospital" for quarantine purposes in a busy port city.  Cases of cholera and various febrile illnesses arriving by ship would be sequestered here for isolation until resolution or death.  Polio patients came here for "care," but not for "treatment" - which was nonexistent.  

By 1952, some iron lungs were in use, especially in the United States, but those devices were immense, expensive, and difficult to use.  In response to a massive epidemic which was killing their children, the Danes discovered the utility of "bagging" via an endotracheal tube.  But no automated ventilators existed, so medical students were recruited to bag patients continuously, 24/7.  Chapter 13 "Student Ventilators" details the development and implementation of this policy.

Nursing care in that era "was rooted in the tradition of a life given over to the work - long shifts, residence at the hospital for life, and no marriage."  That also had to change.  Analysis of blood gases and arterial pH - never before attempted (or considered) - was also invented, as was the concept of an "intensive care unit," (a term first used in 1958).

This book will not be of interest to everyone.  It will have special meaning to current polio survivors, and should be a must-read for respiratory therapy students who want to learn about the invention of their profession and its tools.

Reposted from 2023 because today is World Polio Day (and because some U.S. states are using medieval thought processes to roll back polio immunization requirements).  If any readers of TYWKIWDBI have a post-polio syndrome (as I do), please check out the information at Post-Polio Health.

Reposted from 2025 to accompany an adjacent post about Sheltering Arms Hospital in Minneapolis.

New Hampshire GOP opposes polio vaccine

Fucking idiots:

"New Hampshire could soon beat Florida—known for its anti-vaccine Surgeon General—when it comes to loosening vaccine requirements. A first-in-the-nation bill that’s already passed New Hampshire’s state House, sponsored only by Republican legislators, would end the requirement for parents enrolling kids in child care to provide documentation of polio and measles vaccination. New Hampshire would be the only state in the US to have such a law, although many states allow religious exemptions to vaccine requirements."

(Comment thread now closed) 

Brief but spectacular

More on Judy Heumann's career as a disability rights activist at the BBC.

As a young girl she was a participant at Camp Jered, which is the subject of the film "Crip Camp."  The link has a trailer for the full-length movie, which is excellent.

"Every last child"

European Polio Conference coming in May.

The European Polio Conference, organized by Polio-France in cooperation with the European Polio Union (EPU), will be held on 25-27 May in Nancy, France.  Registration details and further information are available here.

This congress will not be a congress like any other, with a learned society that addresses its colleagues. It will be organized by a patient association that wishes to create the necessary conditions for the exchange of knowledge in order to perpetuate its dissemination, but above all to motivate research and innovation in care. This congress is aimed at people with polio and post-polio syndrome from all over the world, and health professionals concerned by the management of polio and post-polio syndrome.

A major focus of the conference is on the post-polio syndrome:

Polio-France is the only national association that gathers and represents exclusively the people carrying sequelae of poliomyelitis. It is also an active member of the Board of Directors of the European Polio Union (EPU). After the serious epidemics of the 1950s and 1960s, the introduction of compulsory vaccination in 1964 marked the end of cases of poliovirus. Some children died at that time, and about 50,000 survivors in France are in various situations of disability due to the after-effects of the disease.

After leaving the rehabilitation centers and reaching adulthood with their disabilities stabilized, all of them were able to study, work, start a family and pursue a career. Many of them are now reaching retirement age. They have blended into the national landscape, fully integrated, and are no longer visible to the point that 40 to 50 years later, it is common to hear people say: “polio no longer exists!” This is true of the viral threat. Yet the survivors with polio scars are among us ; in our neighborhoods, our businesses, our families. They continue to fight, as they always have.

No scientific hindsight allowed us to imagine that, 40 or 50 years later, the natural effects of aging could play a major role in the life process of these disabled people, degrading their remaining capacities as early as 45-50 years old, with more or less brutality and rapidity. Impoverished by the lack of transmission among most health professionals, the body of knowledge on the management of the after-effects of poliomyelitis is such that there is an urgent need to reinitiate the circulation of this knowledge. It is necessary to create (or perpetuate) spaces for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and management methods. This can only be achieved through events that encourage this type of exchange, as proposed by the Nancy conference.

Their motto:

Anyone who lived in the 1950s and 1960s and is now developing progressive weakness needs to be aware of the post-polio syndrome.  Too often physicians unaware of the entity will ascribe an elderly person's impairment to "aging" or inadequate exercise/diet etc.  Many people had mild polio in the pre-vaccine era and were unaware of it.

"Crip Camp"

I thoroughly enjoyed watching this on Netflix last night.  The first part of the film presents archival footage of Camp Jened, a summer camp for young people with disabilities which was in operation from the 1950s to the 1970s.  The second part of the film follows some of these campers as they become leaders in the disability rights struggles of the 1970s.

I watched this as an "alumnus" of the polio epidemic of 1952, but the film will be of interest to a broad range of viewers - especially those who have family or friends with physical impairments.

The film is reviewed at The New York Times, and the Wikipedia entry is excellent.

Addendum:  The BBC has an excellent article about Judy Heumann, a disability activist featured in the movie.

Dorothea Lange's foot

I had forgotten that Dorothea Lange was a polio survivor.

I think [polio] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once —Dorothea Lange

Photo found in the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, which appears to be selective rather than comprehensive.

Related: Famous poliomyelitis survivors

Social distancing during the polio epidemics

Lots of comparisons being drawn recently between the coronavirus pandemic and the influenza pandemic of 1918.  In the weeks ahead I'll plan to present some information about the more recent polio epidemics, starting with an article by a professor of history at NYU published in The Atlantic today:

Within days [in the spring of 1949] the hospital’s ICU was overflowing with children, most in critical condition, and mild concern turned to panic. “Polio Takes Seventh Life,” screamed the banner headline. “San Angelo Pastors Appeal for Divine Help in Plague.”

Prayer proved insufficient. For the first time in anyone’s memory, social distancing took hold. The city council voted to close theaters, bars, bowling alleys, and the municipal swimming pool. Tanker trucks sprayed DDT, singling out the open pit toilets on the “Negro” and “Mexican” side of town. Tourist traffic disappeared. The locals stopped handling money, and some refused to speak on the telephone, believing that germs traveled through the transmission lines. Known for its neighborliness, San Angelo quickly ditched the niceties that it once took for granted. “We got to the point that nobody could comprehend,” a pediatrician recalled, “when people would not even shake hands.”...

Both the poliovirus and the coronavirus rely on “silent carriers”—those showing no immediate symptoms—to spread the disease, inciting a fearful sense of uncertainty. Both target specific, if dramatically different, age groups: COVID-19 seems especially lethal for the elderly, polio for the young...

Why did most of its victims appear to come from middle-class surroundings? And why was epidemic polio primarily a disease of the 20th century that struck the world’s more developed nations, especially the United States?...

Others see polio’s dramatic spread in the 1940s and ’50s in terms of cleanliness. As Americans grew more germ-conscious and sanitary-minded, there was less chance that they would encounter poliovirus very early in life, when the disease is milder and maternal antibodies provide temporary protection...

The great polio epidemic struck at a time when the federal government wasn’t much involved in the medical problems of the citizenry... Virtually all of the research, publicity, and patient support surrounding polio was accomplished by a single private charity, the March of Dimes, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

More at The Atlantic.

Photo credit Corbis, via NPR.

Summer camps for ventilator-assisted individuals

Ventilator-Asssisted Living is an online resource created and maintained by Post-Polio Health International.  The latest issue has a very useful reference list of camps for ventilator-assisted children for this coming summer of 2020.

Each summer, several camps across the country offer ventilator-assisted children a unique opportunity for fun and growth. These camps offer a wide variety of activities including swimming, sports, talent shows, arts and crafts and special events to entertain and educate campers. More importantly, these camps build confidence, foster independence and offer exciting, new experiences in a safe environment for children requiring ventilatory support. ​

The camps are often staffed by a volunteer force of professionals that include physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, physical and occupational therapists, and educators. They also provide extensive medical and pulmonary care. Some camps also draw their volunteers from among university students majoring in various health care fields. Camps often require physician clearance before a child can attend. ​

Many of the camps are free for attendees, while others offer assistance for those unable to afford them. Often the camps rely on grants and donations for funding. Nearly all of the camps’ websites offer a way to donate online if you wish to support them.

Besides giving kids the opportunity to experience new and exciting activities, these camps also help foster a sense of independence. For many first-time campers, it is their first experience away from home without their parents alongside. 

More at the link.

Also available from PPHI is a directory of funding resources for medical and adaptive equipment.

"This resource guide has been assembled to assist Americans with disabilities, particularly polio survivors with significant motor and breathing impairments, to find financial assistance for the costs of obtaining desired medical equipment and/or environmental adaptive modifications that are otherwise not affordable to them."

The directory lists national resources and (scroll down) state-by-state local resources.

100 years of polio in the U.S.

Quite a remarkable graph; the Salk vaccine was developed in 1952, tested in 1953-54, then used widely.

I was a "participant" in that epidemic of 1952.  My mother used to tell of me crying through one night with muscle cramps; I have no memory of that, but I do remember waking up the next morning, trying to stand by the bed, and falling to the floor because both legs were paralyzed.  After that followed a series of adventures in a Sister Kenny facility in Minneapolis and in later years the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, all of which undoubtedly molded me into the person I am today.

Graph from a superb webpage on polio statistics at Our World in Data - where you can find other pages on other health-related issues (smoking, suicide, cancer, HIV, malaria, etc).

Note - the embed is a screencap; the graph is interactive at the website.

The last survivors in iron lungs

A report at Gizmodo describes the current lives of the last three persons in the U.S. known to be living in iron lungs.

Her iron lung has portholes and windows on the side; a pressure gauge at the top. The machine is actually cobbled together from two iron lungs. One, the March of Dimes gave her when she was a child. The other, she bought from someone in Utah, after she haggled him down from $25,000 to $8,000. The body has also been modified over the years. Her grandfather invented a motorized pulley system that closes the bed tray into the tank after she climbs in. He also replaced the brushed aluminum mirror above the neck slot with a real mirror so that she could have a clear view to the rest of the room when she’s locked in the canister. A local engineer used a motor from an old voter registration device to build a mechanism that tightens the collar around her neck after she slips her head through the portal. The fan belts and half-horsepower motor have been replaced about ten times.

When Lillard was a child, polio was every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst polio outbreak year in US history took place in 1952, a year before Lillard was infected. There were about 58,000 reported cases. Out of all the cases, 21,269 were paralyzed and 3,145 died. “They closed theaters, swimming pools, families would keep their kids away from other kids because of the fear of transmission,” Bruno said. 

I was a participant in that polio epidemic of 1952, as were my mother and sister.  I woke up one morning and fell to the floor because my legs wouldn't hold me up, then spent months in Sheltering Arms, the Minneapolis Sister Kenny Institute before eventually returning home.  What separates me from the three adults in the story above is that the virus only reached my thoracolumbar spine, not the C-spine.

Celebrating post-polio

"I believe one of our secrets to thriving with polio is that we, first and foremost, quietly dismissed all those who gawked at us with pity, volunteered to Biblically heal us, needlessly tried to fix us, or gazed at our bent feet rather than into our eyes.  As we have matured, we have learned to reject the shame and stigma of disability.  What a freedom!  We found out that such negativity gets old and is not useful. Out of necessity, we have had to become introspective from time to time, which inescapably fostered our personal character development.  We have learned to be assertive when needed, to surround ourselves with loved ones, to think positively, get educated, find good resources and enjoy life along the way.

Perhaps most importantly, we have learned to accept ourselves as we are.  Many of us have evolved in our thinking to appreciate and lovingly embrace what used to be our primary nemesis - polio.  In order to find peace and contentment, we have had to make friends with our disability.  Not overcome it.  Not hide it.  And not fight it...  Polio has made us who we are today.

Our physical differences don't matter much anymore because we are all beginning to look like everyone else our age anyway.  We, however, know a bit more about aging gracefully, because we started sooner than all of our friends.  We are aging with a disability.  Many of our friends are aging into disability.  If they'll let us, we can actually help them with their new adjustments."

-- a couple paragraphs from a much longer, refreshingly upbeat, essay by Sunny Roller, MA (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - the lead article in the most recent issue of Post-Polio Health.

India is now officially polio-free

YouTube link.

"Dr. Mathew Varghese, an orthopedic surgeon, runs India's last polio ward at St. Stephen's Hospital in Delhi.  Five years ago, India accounted for nearly half of all new wild poliovirus cases in the country. As of 13 January 2014, the country will celebrate three years without a single case. It's one of the greatest public health accomplishments of all time, and a powerful reminder of just how important it is to continue the fight to eradicate polio worldwide."

From the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website, where Mr. Gates offers this commentary:

"Five years ago, India was home to nearly half of the world’s new polio cases. At the time, if you asked any health expert, they would have said India would be the last place on earth to end polio. India’s population density and high birth rate (27 million new children are born each year), combined with poor sanitation, was like a petri dish for polio.

But the government of India, with help from the organizations that make up the Global Polio Eradication Initiative including Rotary International launched an all-out effort to stop the disease. The country deployed 2 million vaccinators to reach children who had never before been reached with polio vaccines or any other health services—children who live in flooded regions or hard-to-find rural towns, or are regularly in-transit with their families. One of the most powerful images I’ve seen during my visits to India is that of parents proudly holding vaccination cards showing that their children were protected from deadly diseases for the first time.

And now that these children have been found, health workers can supply them with much more than just polio drops. They can provide other critical health services like measles vaccines, clean water, and information about how to deliver their babies safely and care for them during their first weeks of life."

This graph from the WHO, via The Dish:

Using polio virus to treat brain tumors

This MRI depicts a sagittal view of the head of a 15-year-old boy with GBM.

My wife forwarded to me an article in the Washington Post that is absolutely fascinating. 

Glioblastoma multiforme is a particularly vicious type of brain cancer.  It arises from neural tissue and is extremely aggressive, infiltrating in a fashion that makes surgical excision virtually impossible, and is resistant to radiation therapy and chemotherapy (because drugs have difficulty penetrating the blood/brain barrier).

Enter the poliovirus, which has evolved over millenia to target neural tissue:

The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Cancer Center at Duke University has the largest experience on the East Coast with my sort of tumor, so I went there for further consultation and treatment.

As doctors there examined me, it was obvious that my tumor had already grown again; in fact, it had quadrupled in size since my initial chemo and radiation. I was offered several treatments and experimental protocols, one of which involved implanting a modified polio virus into my brain. (This had been very successful in treating GBMs in mice.) Duke researchers had been working on this for 10 years and had just received permission from the FDA to treat 10 patients, but for only one a month. (A Duke press release last May explained that the treatment was designed to capitalize “on the discovery that cancer cells have an abundance of receptors that work like magnets in drawing the poliovirus, which then infects and kills the cells. The investigational therapy . . . uses an engineered form of the virus that is lethal to cancer cells, while harmless to normal cells. The therapy is infused directly into a patient’s tumor. The virus-based therapy also triggers the body’s immune system to attack the infected tumor cells.”)...

I returned to Duke a month after the infusion, and though an MRI showed some expected swelling, the more significant fact was that the tumor had stopped growing. I have gone back to Duke every two months since then, and the tumor, initially the size of a grape, is now a scar, the size of a small pea. It’s been two years since the initial biopsy and radiation, and one year since the experimental polio viral treatment, and I have no evidence of recurrence nor tumor regrowth.

Bill Gates' crusade against polio

Later this month, Gates will deliver the BBC’s Dimbleby Lecture, taking as his theme the value of the young human being. Every child, he will say, has the right to a healthy and productive life, and he will explain how technology and innovation can help towards the attainment of that still-distant goal. Gates has put his money where his mouth is. He and his wife Melinda have so far given away $28 billion via their charitable foundation, more than $8  billion of it to improve global health...

“We’re focused on the help of the poorest in the world, which really drives you into vaccination. You can actually take a disease and get rid of it altogether, like we are doing with polio.”  This has been done only once before in humans, with the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s.  “Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.”..

For Gates, though, polio is a totem. The abolition of the disease will be a headline-grabber, spurring countries on to greater efforts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will spend $1.8 billion in the next six years to accomplish that goal, almost a third of the global effort.

“All you need is over 90 per cent of children to have the vaccine drop three times and the disease stops spreading. The number of cases eventually goes to zero. When we started, we had over 400,000 children a year being paralysed and we are now down to under 1,000 cases a year. The great thing about finishing polio is that we’ll have resources to get going on malaria and measles.”

“It doesn’t relate to any particular religion; it’s about human dignity and equality,” he says. “The golden rule that all lives have equal value and we should treat people as we would like to be treated.”  

I'm a polio survivor, and I applaud his efforts.  Also, I discovered last week that one of my former students is a program director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Lady survives for 60 years using iron lung

June Middleton is a Melbourne, Australia woman who in 1949 contracted poliomyelitis with a high enough residual deficit (quadriplegia) to require ventilatory support from an iron lung. The photo shows her with an abdomional cuirass, which would have allowed her a degree of daytime mobility, but she probably returned to the iron lung for sleep. More details at the Daily Mail.

I contracted polio just three years after this lady did, and I'm thankful that my orthopedic problems have been minor in comparison to what some people have endured. Kudos to this brave lady - and to her caregivers.