Word: polio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Theresa Dunn, Rossner's Quinn-character, had been uncomfortable with herself, both physically and personally since age four when polio left her spine curved. Though the spine was straightened somewhat by an operation and a year in the hospital left her with only the slightest limp, Theresa always retained a sense of her illness as something shameful. Her parents treated her differently than their other children, both pitying her and feeling guilty for not being able to prevent her illness. Theresa felt as though her mother was constantly reproaching her for not being so pretty and athletic as her younger...
...York, for example, State Health Commissioner Robert P. Whalen reports that about 20% of the 300,000 children due to enter first grade have not been immunized against polio, measles or rubella. Most of them are not even protected against diphtheria, the vaccine for which is included in the three-way D.T.P. (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) shots that have long been standard treatment for all infants. In some areas, Whalen says, less than half of the entering class have been immunized. There have been similar or even greater drop-offs in vaccinations among preschool children in most other states...
Proved Protection. Whatever the cause-parental overconfidence, carelessness or ignorance-the situation may well lead to a comeback by diseases that had been almost conquered. In the 20 years since polio vaccines became available, the number of U.S. cases of that crippling and often fatal disease has fallen from a peak of 58,000 in 1952 to a mere seven in 1974. Common or "red" measles (rubeola) used to strike 4 million children a year, kill 400 and leave 800 with irreparable brain damage. By last year, the total number of cases was down to 22,000; only a handful...
...cause of the current parental apathy and neglect, New York's Commissioner Whalen suggests, is that many of today's preschoolers have mothers who are too young to have been aware of the great polio panics of the early 1950s, or of the fetus-crippling rubella epidemics of the early '60s. In ethnic ghettos, poverty, illiteracy and language barriers are also factors...
...barracks at huge Travis Air Force Base in Northern California; an Evangelical church in the sere hills of Los Gatos, 50 miles south of San Francisco; a beer hall in Mount Angel, Ore., where Benedictine sisters from a nearby priory were attending the confused, weary children, many of them polio victims...