Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Stickball Revenge. One night last week two boys walked through an uptown Manhattan park. One was 15-year-old Michael Farmer, who limped as a result of a childhood polio attack. The other was his friend, Roger McShane, 16. Suddenly, from the bushes sprang 17 members of the Egyptian Kings. Slashing with knives, the gang knocked the two boys to the ground, killed Mike Farmer and hurried away as Roger McShane, badly wounded, dragged himself into the street for help...
...Polio is declining sharply in most of the U.S. for the second year, with abundant evidence that much of the improvement is due to the Salk vaccine. Four months of the "disease year" (since the number of cases reached its annual low around April 1) have passed, and indications are that fewer than 1,900 cases will be reported for the period. This is just half the 3,800 in the same period last year, and less than one-third of the 1951-56 average tally. So far this year no area has reported a major epidemic comparable to Chicago...
...Health Service officials is the decline in paralytic as compared with nonparalytic cases. At this time last year, half of all cases were listed as paralytic, one-third as nonparalytic. This year fewer than one-third are paralytic, about half nonparalytic (the rest are unspecified). The overall decline in polio might reflect in part a natural ebb of the disease, but the relative drop in paralytic cases is almost certainly attributable to vaccination...
...Million Shots. Vaccines of the general type developed by Dr. Salk have been widely used only in the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Australia and Israel. Noting 1956's 50% drop in polio in the U.S., the U.S. Public Health Service's Dr. Alexander Langmuir saw increasingly good results ahead: "With increasing immunization of the population under 40, a steady reduction in paralytic cases can be confidently anticipated." Denmark, long hard-hit by polio, had the brightest progress report: 99% of children up to the age of nine and 90% of all Danes aged ten to 40 have had shots...
...first doctors thought of poison or polio. But a bright young resident physician, hearing Myrna's parents describe how the paralysis had crept up to her head, remarked: "It sounds like tick paralysis, so be sure to look for a tick." Attendants found an engorged tick embedded in Myrna's hair,, its head deep in her scalp. A doctor sprayed the area with ethyl chloride, which froze the tick so that it could not burrow deeper (as ticks do when disturbed), worked it out with a pair of tweezers, taking care not to break off the head. Within...