Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With the onset of cooler weather, 1952's record-breaking polio epidemic was on the wane all across the country. Nevertheless, scattered here & there were hundreds of new cases that looked like poliomyelitis. Patients, mostly youngsters, who had headaches, fever, nausea, stiff neck or muscular difficulties were rushed to hospitals, and their cases were entered in the polio records. The truth was that many of the new patients did not have polio at all. There was good reason to believe that the season was producing an unusually large number of virus infections that only seemed to be polio...
During an epidemic, if a patient shows the standard combination of polio symptoms, including localized paralysis, the chances are that the doctors are right in calling the disease polio. In any case, the patient still gets good care and usually does not suffer, even if the diagnosis is wrong. But during every epidemic there are many cases called polio in which there is no paralysis, or only a short-lived muscle weakness. And some doctors suspect that there is a higher proportion of these among the scattered cases which crop up after the epidemic season is past...
Supply & Demand, The worst drawbacks, however, have nothing to do with G.G. itself. They are matters of supply & demand. It takes almost a pint of blood to make an average shot of G.G. (7 cc). To give protection for a single polio season to all the 41 million U.S. children under 15 might take 100 million shots or more, and there simply is not that much gamma globulin available, nor the blood or plasma to extract it from...
...shudder to think of next summer's mass hysteria among parents who know of gamma globulin." He foresaw all kinds of abuses: bootlegging in G.G., racketeering with worthless substitutes, faking measles to wangle a shot of G.G. in areas where it is not being given-for polio. This expert's solution: declare a national emergency, giving the Government a monopoly of blood and blood products; allot G.G. only to areas with the worst epidemics; let a public authority (not pharmacists) dispense it for doctors to inject...
...A.M.A.'s Dr. Paul L. Wermer doubted that the Government would have to step in so far. He was glad that the news had come out at the end of a polio season. "It gives us time to prepare," he said, "and time to think it over soberly without a background of emotion and hysteria." Dr. Wermer admitted that reserving G.G. for areas with proven epidemics means that the first children stricken in any region will be denied its benefits...