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0 pointsTor32y ago0 comments

My father had polio when he was 3. He learned to walk again before he was 5, but he always had a weak right leg (polio kills nerves, so there weren't enough nerves to serve all the muscle - so he lost most of the muscle mass in that leg). The problem is that when you get old you may find that all your nerves were in fact affected by polio back then, which is what happened to my father. The rest of his nerves started to fail, and in the end he didn't have enough strength (due to dead nerves) for breathing properly, so he died because he couldn't breath well enough to get rid of enough CO2.

Polio is a horrible, horrible disease, and entirely preventable by a simple vaccine, and anti-vaxxers opposing vaccines are some of the most ignorant people on earth.

Polio is also special in that you can't just do muscle training. The remaining nerves are overworked, so if you exercise too much (and that isn't very much) more nerves start dying on you. It's a difficult balance, and these days there are very few doctors around who actually understand polio and can advice correctly on what to do for the few new cases worldwide today, and the same for those (like my father) who get post-polio effects later in life.

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hilbert422y ago

"Polio is a horrible, horrible disease, and entirely preventable by a simple vaccine, and anti-vaxxers opposing vaccines are some of the most ignorant people on earth."

That video of Paul Alexander upset me terribly as for me polio is rather close to home. I never caught polio but two kids in my primary school class caught the horrid disease, one died and the other ended up with calipers permanently strapped to his legs. Several other kids who were not in my class also caught the disease. Later, after I left school one of my workmates had to get about in calipers and a walking stick. When I was young it was not uncommon to see people in calipers.

After the kids in my class caught polio we had to wait about three years for the Salk vaccine. By then, we were in highschool. On one morning we were all lined up class after class in the forecourt of our assembly hall. We were formed into two lines—one for boys and one for girls. The lines led into the hall and we were vaccinated army-style—quick and no mucking about. Between morning recess and lunchtime the whole school had been vaccinated, about 1,100 or so kids. It's possible but I cannot recall any kid not being vaccinated (if we'd known any such kid then he/she would have been the talk of the school).

I doubt if anyone who went through that polio epidemic would have any time for anti-vaxxers. They were essentially unheard of back then (even then, the tiny few who weren't vaccinated was because of their religious beliefs). Even the terrible tragedy of the badly manufactured batch of vaccine that still had live viruses in it and killed kids only slowed vaccinations down until the public was reassured the batches were OK. We were just so thankful to get the vaccine, everyone knew who Jonas Salk was, he was a true hero.

Unless one actually went though that horrible time one cannot envisage how truly bad it was. We kids were scared enough but our parents were terrified. If anti-vaxxers had had a presence back then as they did during COVID then it's possible they could have been lynched.

Truly horribe newsreel footage of rows and rows of kids in iron lungs horrified people in ways that never happened with COVID, the situation was so grave people wouldn't have tolerated that nonsense as they did during COVID. Tragically, the polio epidemic reached its peak in the early to mid 1950s so now there are few around to remind people how bad epidemics can be. As a society we've very short memories (it's not only epidemics, we're just as forgetful when it comes to wars).

What happened with COVID—anti-vaxxers carrying on and those who refused to wear masks out of sheer bloody mindedness, or because they didn't want government to tell them what to do actually shook my view of human nature. I still have difficulty in comprehending what actually happened, it's as if a large section of society had suddenly turned into lemmings and started marching towards the ocean. For most of my life I thought the human species was smarter than that.

How wrong I was.

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