Word: polio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rosalind Ragans can still remember the contagion ward in a New York City hospital where she spent three months as a victim of the 1944 polio epidemic. Of the nearly 600,000 Americans who were infected by the poliomyelitis virus in this century before the development of vaccines for the disease in the 1950s, about 10% died, while many of the survivors, like Ragans, suffered some degree of paralysis. Stricken at age eleven, she was at first confined to a wheelchair, but gradually recovered enough to lead a normal life. Her slight difficulty in walking and partly paralyzed right...
Then, about ten years ago, she noticed that the pain and weakness she had endured as a polio victim were returning. Says she: "My right arm was hanging by my side. I began to get frightened." Seeking help, Ragans visited the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Georgia, named for perhaps the most famous polio victim, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There doctors finally diagnosed her problem: post-poliomyelitis muscular atrophy, an affliction that strikes many former polio patients with symptoms that in some ways mimic the original disease. Across the U.S., PPMA is affecting more and more...
Still, because only a handful of Americans now contract polio every year, most doctors practicing in the U.S. have never seen a case. Says Dr. Jacquelin Perry, chief of pathokinesiology at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center in Downey, Calif.: "No one anticipated this. It has taken us by surprise...
...Polio paralyzes its victims by killing off the spinal cord's motor-nerve cells, which control various muscles. In some cases, when muscles in the chest become too weak to function properly, polio victims need mechanical assistance simply to breathe. Though many of the polio victims who survive are left partly paralyzed, they often make dramatic progress. Muscles that had fallen slack begin to work again when healthy nerve cells sprout new connecting fibers and take over the work of cells ravaged by polio...
...imperative to respect the individual, he counsels: if you must do it, do it, but do not deny the moral force of the imperative you violate. In a society that grants the future some claims, a society that will not countenance the endless destruction of children by polio - or by hypoplastic left-heart syndrome - " research medicine, like politics, [becomes] a realm in which men have to 'sin bravely.' " Baby Fae lived, and died, in that realm. Only the bravery was missing: no one would admit the violation. Bravery was instead fatuously ascribed to Baby Fae, a creature...