Word: polio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...came out too. This was not the first time that Brown had claimed a wonder-working discovery. Born in Portugal of a U.S. seaman father, he had owned a drugstore in New Bedford, Mass., but had also run a "clinic" where patients were treated for everything from cancer to polio. On Nov. 13, 1939, he had been fined $1,000 for illegal practice of medicine, later had the sentence nullified. John Brown says he was framed...
...misshapen ranks of the world's diseases, poliomyelitis is only an infant-sized killer compared with a giant like malaria. As a disabler, it stands well below mental illness. But polio is the disease most feared by U.S. mothers, for it strikes with cruel suddenness, and (though the proportion of older victims is increasing in many parts of the world) its victims are still mostly children...
This looked like a bad year for mothers. Since Jan. 1, there have been 2,881-cases of polio in the U.S. By the same date in 1946 (the year when the U.S. had the largest number of cases in its history), only 2,165 had been reported. Three states reported more than 50 new cases in a single week: North Carolina, 131; California, 92; Texas, 89. Five citizens of Newport News, Va. petitioned Virginia's Governor Tuck to close the border with North Carolina, where total cases in the outbreak had reached...
...Polio publicity has made polio research dollar-rich, while other less dramatized diseases are dime-poor. In spite of research, however, there is no known way to prevent polio nor to cure it. Addressing the First International Poliomyelitis Conference in Manhattan last week, Dr. Hart E. Van Riper, medical director of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, said: "We may be fighting not one disease, but a whole family of slightly related diseases. We do know already that there are several strains of infantile paralysis capable of producing clinical symptoms, but we do not know how closely related these virus...
...delegates voted to extend the fight, set up a permanent World Congress on Poliomyelitis as a scientific clearing house. For mothers there were some reassuring statistics: mortality from polio averages only 1%; the number of children permanently crippled has seldom been more than 1½%, even during the worst epidemics...