Word: polio
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Back in the 1950s it was polio. Nowadays the big summertime scare--at least in the suburbs of the Northeast and northern Midwest--is Lyme disease. Caught early enough, the tick-borne infection can usually be cleared by taking antibiotics. But if the corkscrew-shaped bacteria, or spirochetes, that cause Lyme disease linger undetected in the body, they can trigger crippling arthritis, serious heart problems and even nerve damage...
...some politicians are at their best when running for office, so Salk came into his own as a spokesman for vaccination. Although it is generally accepted in the field that the real man on the monument should be Enders (who in 1954 shared the only Nobel Prize given for polio research), it seems unlikely that either he or the pugnacious Sabin would have performed half so patiently as Salk the ceremonial chores expected of monuments or would have sat so politely through so many interviews and spread the gospel of disease prevention quite so far and wide and indefatigably...
...last thing. Like the millions of American veterans who have never ceased thanking Harry Truman for dropping the Bomb and ending World War II, the folks who got their polio shot between the first Salk vaccine and the Sabin model have never had any quarrel with Salk's high place in history. (The two vaccines are now given in alternating booster shots.) There are times when even genius has to give way to the old Yankee virtues of know-how and can do. And if in this instance these happened to be embodied in the son of a couple...
Novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed wrote about his battle with polio in In Love with Daylight...
...virologist Jonas Salk develops the first effective polio vaccine...