Word: polio
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...attack better-nourished children. In mice experiments, if the animals' diet was deficient in thiamin (vitamin B1), the incubation period was prolonged, and the paralysis and mortality rates were cut down. It was also found that if thiamin was added to the diet of infected animals, the polio often developed quickly into paralysis. But the picture was not all dark. In many cases, vitamins proved to be a shield against disease. One dramatic example: pigeons deprived of vitamin B got sleeping sickness-to which they are normally immune. The doctors, cautious as usual, wanted to give the whole subject...
Last week, professional polio fighters decided that the scare campaign had gone too far. Dr. Harry M. Weaver, research director of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, declared that false rumors about polio can do more harm than the disease itself. Dr. Weaver stressed the positive gains made in polio research (on which the Foundation has spent almost $11 million, will spend $2,000,000 this year). In fact, these boil down to the knowledge that there are at least three types of polio virus (and possibly several strains of each type), and that the virus is usually transmitted...
Flies & Freezers. Scientists still do not know how the virus is transmitted (although it has been found on flies), or why polio is a hot-weather disease (although the virus can live a year in the deepfreeze), or why it has become more severe in the last half-century, especially in countries with high living standards. They do not know why it has become less common in New England, and far more serious in Kansas and California...
Most of the new knowledge is negative, but it is on the side of more calm and less panic. This week it became known that great numbers of cases diagnosed and reported as polio may not be polio at all. Three researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine reported that they had isolated a virus which causes a disease like non-paralytic polio. They found it last year in so-called polio victims in several cities. Still unnamed, the disease apparently does no lasting harm...
There is no accurate comparison between polio conditions this year or in 1948 (with 27,680 cases) and those in 1916 (with 30,000). In reality there must have been two or three times as many cases in the 1916 epidemic which went unrecognized and unreported. As diagnosis and reporting improve each year, more mild cases get hospital treatment, which is all to the good. They also get into the statistics and the headlines...