Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Acting Manager Bob Swift insists, "He's going to be one of the great ballplayers." Close friends lay Maris' poker-faced concentration to a desire to make good for his brother Rudy, whose career as a player back home in Fargo, N. Dak. was stopped by polio in 1951. With speed on the base paths and wall-climbing tenacity in the outfield to back up his hitting, Maris is the main reason the Athletics soared as high as third place last month...
...With polio epidemics raging in Des Moines and Kansas City, and scores of needy patients requiring costly, round-the-clock hospital care, the funds allotted to local chapters by the National Foundation from the March of Dimes were fast running out. So the foundation asked local authorities for permission to stage out-of-season drives for emergency funds. Des Moines agreed, and more than $50,000 has been collected. But in Kansas City the request blew up a storm...
...taxpayers' expense. It ordered the city's health department to make sure that all needy patients get treated at the city's General Hospital. But this left a lot of loose ends. Many patients were being treated in private hospitals-and with the high costs of polio care, almost every family becomes needy...
While the city fathers fiddled, the virus spread. Kansas City had 109 cases of polio (nearly half of them paralytic) by week's end, with no sign that the epidemic was abating...
Just when polio vaccine was needed most, supplies were thin and spotty. Reason : spurts and lags in public demand have bedeviled the vaccine makers. Last year Eli Lilly & Co. alone destroyed n million doses for lack of takers (the vaccine deteriorates after six months). This year the U.S. Public Health Service has asked manufacturers to cut out exports. Both Lilly and Merck Sharp & Dohme laboratories have stepped up output; U.S. production to date (from five manufacturers) is up to more than 50 million doses-10% ahead of last year. But last week, with the belated demand for shots running ahead...