A Polio Perspective

The virus came in like a frightening storm.

It rolled into cities and then rural areas, terrifying families unaware of its infectious spread. Silent carriers of the disease showed no signs at all. Thousands died and thousands more were bedridden for weeks.

Doctors could treat symptoms but were powerless to cure it. The federal government’s response, while well intended with health measures and warnings, was largely ineffective to the spread of the virus.
No, that virus wasn’t the COVID-19 coronavirus.

It was polio, or poliomyelitis, or the poliovirus, a paralyzing and potentially deadly disease that most commonly affects children, was the most feared communicable disease of the 1940s and 1950s. The highly infectious virus spread, doctors know now, through contaminated water or food or contact with a infected individual. Some infected children didn’t show symptoms.

By the 1952, the worst year of the virus, there were nearly 60,000 cases reported, more than 3,000 people died and thousands more were left crippled by disabling paralysis.

Dr. Jonas Salk eventually developed the first vaccine in 1955 that led the eradication of polio in the U.S. by 1979.

Much like the mysteries at the onset of the coronavirus last March that continue to confound doctors today as they attempt to develop a vaccine,  it’s genesis and the near daily discoveries of both symptoms and treatment, polio was even more confounding to doctors in the first half of the 20th century.

There are certainly differences between poliovirus and the coronavirus – polio is neurological, COVID-19 is respiratory; one was contact spread and the other is both contact spread and airborne – but the resulting hysteria associated with the diseases and its impact on America 70 years apart is striking.

Stan Sibley, 76, is retired now. He put in more than 40 years in education in Nebraska and Iowa, serving as the Glenwood Community School District superintendent from 2001 to 2010. He liked the town so much he and his wife stayed. But in 1949, Sibley was one of the thousands of children to contract polio.

He was 4 years old.

Sibley’s memories of that summer in 1949 are partially his own hazy recall and partially his mother’s stories, shared over the following decades. It was her that took him to the hospital after he began to feel a numbness in a leg, the telltale sign of the onset of the disease.

“Not understanding it, I started crying and screaming,” Sibley said.

They called those summers “polio season,” Sibley said. He and his 7-year-old brother were well aware of the virus by then. They were not to exert themselves, the community pool was off-limits and they had to take frequent naps.
He had no idea how he contracted the virus; contact tracing wasn’t yet a thing.

“We lived in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and I was only four so my big brother had to kind of watch over me a little bit,” he said. “I have no idea if I got it from someone else or something in the environment.”

It was a rainy night in June when Sibley’s mother took him into the Madison, Wisc., hospital where he’d spend the next several weeks in a ward of nearly 20 other children, all suffering from the virus. Sibley’s mother sang him a lullaby before the nurses ushered her out.

The numbness soon spread to his other leg and his arms. The concern of the virus was the rapid spread would cause paralysis of involuntary muscles of the lungs. The iron lung, a tank ventilator, was common at the time. It would enclose a patient’s body to vary air pressure to help stimulate breathing.

Sibley never reached the iron lung.

Treatments and therapies of the era were varied in both efficacy and success. Each day in the hospital, Sibley would be submerged in a tub of hot water while nurses painfully manipulated his limbs, stretching the muscles, perhaps attempting to activate his muscle memory, Sibley wonders now.

“I don’t remember much of it, but my mother told me the nurses told her it was so excruciating it feels like bending a child’s elbow the wrong way,” Sibley said.

After several weeks Sibley began to regain the feeling in his arms and legs and then lifting himself off the bed.
Sibley isn’t sure exactly how long he was in the hospital, he thinks five or six weeks that summer. But when he got out of the hospital he does remember one thing:

“I walked out of the hospital,” he said. “I was only four so they probably carried me part of the way but I remember walking.”

He had no lingering effects of the virus and he was back playing with his brother and friends “doing all the normal things kids do of that age,” within a few days after returning home. Today, he still has some stiffness in his legs on occasion but that he mostly chalks up to age.

Sibley sees a lot of similarities between the coronavirus and the “polio season” of his youth. The panic and fear, parents frightened to let their children play outside or with other children, being symptomatic and asymptomatic and not knowing where the virus comes from or how to protect yourself and not having a cure, only having treatments.

“That’s all very, very similar,” he said. “Obviously, our science is so much better today. There’s probably less fear than there was then simply because people understand viruses better and understand ways to better protect ourselves, although we don’t all do that obviously.”

But the thing that strikes Sibley the most about the parallels is full circle. As child, it was his demographic that was most impacted by polio and now, as a 76-year-old, it’s his current demographic, older adults, that is most at-risk to the coronavirus.

“You wonder about that,” he said. “I know I’m not alone and there are lots of people in the community that had polio. And here were are in another pandemic.”

Like many Americans, Sibley is left waiting, hoping for a vaccine that can return life back to normal soon. It’s a familiar sentiment, he said.

“It has the kind of feeling that we all had in those days before the vaccine was out there,” he said. “You were always looking over your shoulder. You were always afraid that thing could still bite you. Even though I had polio when the vaccine came out, my folks still made sure I got it because there was no for sure sign you’d always be immune.”

Sibley’s experience with polio factored heavily in his joining Rotary International over a decade ago. The group is a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and has contributed over $2 billion to the fight against the disease.

“I didn’t know it (polio) was still raging in places until I joined,” Sibley said.

Sibley has helped organize the Rotary Club’s spring chili supper in Glenwood every year to raise funds on behalf of the PolioPlus project fighting the disease in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, much like their role in curing COVID-19, are a partner in the polio fight.

It was the work of organizations like Rotary and the March of Dimes, the group largely credited for helping end the polio epidemic in the U.S., which likely saved thousands of lives.

Sibley still gives annually to March of Dimes. He has very personal reasons.

His family wasn’t wealthy, there was no medical insurance to speak of to cover the medical bills and his father, an undertaker, was saving every penny he could to attend the seminary. When Mr. Sibley entered the hospital to make the financial arrangements for his son’s medical bills, he was crestfallen and uncertain how he’d ever pay it all back.

But he was told, “Mr. Sibley, there are no bills. The March of Dimes has paid the entire bill.”

“It was, in my folks’ view, the second miracle of the day,” Sibley said. “The first was my going home and the second was they didn’t have to go into debt because of it.”

The Opinion-Tribune

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