Word: polio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MOST SUCCESSFUL PUBlic-health programs ever conducted, without doubt, was the U.S. campaign against polio in the 1950s and '60s. In less than a decade, the withering scourge that had at one point struck nearly 60,000 children a year was all but eradicated from American shores. Almost forgotten in the decades since, however, has been the terrible price a small number of children pay as a by-product of the protection the rest of the population enjoys. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, six babies a year, on average, contract paralytic polio from the very vaccine...
...panel faced a difficult dilemma. For 30 years, doctors have had a choice between two competing polio vaccines. The first, pioneered by Salk, is made from viruses that have been inactivated or "killed." It protects those who are vaccinated but does not stop them from harboring live viruses in their intestines. Should they encounter polio "in the wild," they could become silent carriers and pass the pathogen on to others who have not been inoculated. If polio were to break out--as it did in the U.S. in the '50s, and as it has right now in parts of India...
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who knew intelligence when he saw it, judged Franklin Roosevelt "a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Born and educated as an aristocrat, F.D.R. had polio and needed a wheelchair for most of his adult life. Yet, far from becoming a self-pitying wretch, he developed an unbridled optimism that served him and the country well during the Depression and World War II--this despite, or because of, what Princeton professor Fred Greenstein calls Roosevelt's "tendency toward deviousness and duplicity...
...precisely 1:25 p.m. on Hayes Street near Franklin in San Francisco, Mary Lou Breslin's motorized wheelchair spat out a shower of sparks and died. Breslin, 50, disabled by polio since childhood, had been shopping with her friend, Kathy Martinez, 36, who is blind. "I haven't been dead in the water for years," Breslin muttered angrily. With that, she and Martinez began to "strategize," their term for improvising in the face of emergencies. As able-bodied pedestrians moved past in a hurried blur, Breslin pulled out her cellular phone and started making calls...
...authors" with nature in their destiny--such as, for instance, his own. "I could have studied the immunological properties of, say, the tobacco mosaic virus,'' he once reflected, "published my findings, and they would have been of some interest. But the fact that I chose to work on the polio virus, which brought control of a dreaded disease, made all the difference.'' All the difference for him. And for hundreds of thousands of others...