Word: polio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Died. Michael Flanders, 53, gruff-voiced English musical comedian best known for his long partnership with Schoolmate Donald Swann in their wacky At the Drop of a Hat revues; of an apparent heart attack; while vacationing in North Wales. Crippled by polio during World War II, the bulky, bearded Flanders performed from a wheelchair, while the spindly, cricketlike Swann hunched over his piano diffidently, squeaking multilingual ballads. Their routines were a confection of bluff nonsense ("If God had meant us to fly, he'd never have given us the railway"). Flanders and Swann entertained cabaret and theater audiences...