Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Salk vaccine shots were so ignored in Detroit this summer that doctors and druggists had to return outdated supplies. Last week, with a growing epidemic, Detroit was the worst polio spot in the U.S. Statistics: 464 current cases (230 paralytic) and 14 deaths, against a total of 163 cases and two deaths by the same week last year. Well over half (279) of the victims were Negroes, mainly children under 15, centered in the city's low-income Negro sections. This week they could plead neither ignorance nor poverty. Polio was suddenly Detroit's best-publicized word...
...head. "Shake it, gal!" they yelled, happily ignorant that Dancer Anita Lopez was a bewigged male. On down the back end (the sideshows) of the carny, they plunked their dimes down for Jennie Thurman, "The Girl in the Iron Lung." (Healthy Jennie, 17, "did have a touch of polio" once when she was a little girl, insists her father, foreman at the Ferris wheel...
...plastic bags. Increasingly, middle-class housewives leave their maids at home (thus ending the maids' expected rake-off on the week's shopping money), personally wheel their market carts in air-conditioned luxury past shelves labeled in English "roast chicken" (which presumably sounds more exotic than polio arrosto). Tommy-gun-toting guards accompany the cashiers to the company's central office with the day's take; the supermarkets' loss from theft is less than...
Paralytic polio rose ominously in August, announced the U.S. Public Health Service. Each week's total cases considerably topped those in the comparable weeks last year. In the week ending Aug. 23 there were 144 cases (43 in Michigan, mainly in Detroit), against 96 for the same week of 1957. In the week ending Aug. 30 the total fell only slightly to 126 cases, against 76 last year. Warned Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney: "The tragic fact is that many of the cases could have been prevented. Salk vaccine gives 70% to 90% protection against polio, but about...
...other areas live-virus vaccinations were begun after an epidemic of paralytic polio (Type 1) had already broken out. Each time Chat seemed to check the outbreak: not a single paralytic case was reported after the immunization teams had done their work...