I am the polio virus and I saw the pharaohs come and go
SportsI am the Polio virus, and I have inhabited this planet for many years that I care to remember. I was there with the ancient Egyptians long before Menes unified the two kingdoms of Lower and Upper Egypt in 3100 BC In fact, the finding of misshapen bones from some mummies shows that I was already celebrating my sixth hundred years before his unification party. You know I followed the Badarians south to Abydos in Upper Egypt, helping them smelt copper, even supervising the construction of their mud-brick, thatched houses.
But enough about that, suffice it to say that I must have liked sunsets over the Nile because it was still there if you look at the stone reliefs from 1500 BC, those poor priests with their stunted short legs, their wasting muscles, their stunted bone growth. Look a little closer at the artifacts on display the next time you’re near that old sand museum in Maydan El Tahrir, Cairo, and you’ll probably see my business cards. Anyway, having enough of the Akhenatens and the Amarnas, I decided that I needed a Greek vacation and came to the island of Kos. It was in the early fourth century, when Ictinus was designing the Parthenon and Pericles was still trying to find which Irish bar served the best tequila slammers on Ios.
Well, who did I run into but Hippocrates himself and he even mentioned me under the heading of ‘infantile paralysis’ in his latest book ‘The Hippocratic Corpus’. OK! It wasn’t exactly a bestseller, but with Plato, Philolaus, and newcomer Lysis de Epaminondas trying to make it to the Christmas list, well, he had some strong opposition, you know. By the way, my name is Greek, pilios (grey), myel (marrow) and itis (inflammation). Well, it’s actually not as bad as it seems, after all it could have been worse. Can you imagine telling some poor Irish women that their teenage daughter just made friends with Spiro?
And when the Roman Empire fell and filthy barbarians descended on their cities, looting artifacts and burning books, I went with the Irish who took on the great job of copying all Western literature and was called ‘the pestilence called lameness’ by Celtic doctors. . For centuries, I remained a mild disease often ignored by doctors until a brilliant spark left the urinal for the modern toilet, unknowingly transforming me into a paralyzing agent of epidemic proportions. Improvements in waste disposal and the widespread use of indoor plumbing in the late 19th century meant that babies were no longer exposed to me at a young age and did not acquire natural immunity.
God bless the Huns, perhaps they had some use after all! When I visited the Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott at the tender age of eighteen months, his doctors thought he had ‘teething fever’. His grandfather, Dr. Rutherford, even suggested that the boy should be taken to the country, where the clean air would be good for his lame leg. I visited Stuttgart in 1840 and was even mentioned in a book by the renowned physician of the time, Dr. Jacob von Heine. Later, I was even called the Brunhild virus, which means, of course, “armored fighter”, but was actually named after an Icelandic queen from the Nibelungenlied epic.
It was not my cup of tea.
Anyway, back to my story. In 1916, I crossed the Atlantic and while poor Padraig Pearse was busy fighting in the General Post Office, I checked out the new flush toilets in New York. That summer I befriended thousands of young children in the city, and panic broke out as thousands of families fled Manhattan. Speaking of bioterrorism at its finest, the Department of Health quarantined the city and hundreds of families returned to the Brooklyn Bridge. By the end of the summer, two thousand children in Manhattan had died and I had paralyzed another nine thousand.
At the time of the Great Depression, I was the most feared disease known to the planet and everywhere there was sanitation there were people limping on crutches, rolling around in wheelchairs, immobile in gigantic iron lungs, the legions of sick, without knowing anything what was causing his distress. Things got so bad that President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on me and used the tremendous resources of the postwar United States to try to develop a vaccine against me.
However, the 1930s were years of great poverty, and medical advances were often rushed in an effort to stop my advances. In 1935, Maurice Brodie and John Kollmer conducted field trials for a new vaccine. Brodie prepared his vaccine from an emulsion of the ground spinal cord of infected monkeys. He even tried to deactivate me by exposing me to formalin and then tested the concoction on twenty monkeys and 3,000 children. The less said about this the better, as in the words of one historian at the time, “something went terribly wrong and his concoction was never used again.”
Kollmer then tried to mix me with various chemicals and put me in a refrigerator for two weeks. The new ‘attenuated’ virus, he called me. Well, he tested this veritable ‘witches’ brew’ on some monkeys, himself, his children and twenty-two others. He even began distributing it to hundreds of doctors across the country, but after being blamed for causing many cases of polio, some even fatal, he gave up the search. Kolmer addressed a meeting of the Southern Branch of the American Public Health Association in 1935, with the words “Gentlemen, this is one time I wish the floor would open up and swallow me.” To be fair, he did manage to pick up the pieces and go on with a successful, if not distinguished, research career.
But poor old Brodie died soon after, but not before accepting a minor research position in Michigan. It’s rumored in many circles that he took his own life, but either way he wasn’t around to see Jonas Salk have any more success with the problem. True, he also dunked me in formaldehyde but he also heated me up in an effort to find my soft spot. You would have thought that after all those summers in Egypt and Greece, I would be a little more used to the heat, but as an American bomber with a Taliban in its sights, I knew I had my back. In 1952, he inoculated his wife and his three children with his mixture and they all began to produce antibodies against the disease, but no one got sick.
The following year, he published the results in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and tests were conducted nationally. By 1952, he had befriended me in over 57,628 cases, making it the worst year yet. His former mentor, Thomas Francis, Jr., who had helped him develop the flu vaccine during World War II, decided that the United States should initiate a mass vaccination of its schoolchildren. In the early 1960s, I was on the run and when Albert Sabin started producing different oral versions of me, I decided to go into hiding. By 1964, approximately 100 million Americans had taken Sabin’s vaccine with sugar cubes or sweetened syrup. The fact that it could be taken orally and kept in the refrigerator until time of administration made it easy to administer in third world countries like Africa. After getting the vaccine, you could even excrete live poliovirus in your feces and indirectly immunize all your neighbors. What a chance I had! God bless the Jews for their ingenuity!
Soon I was just a memory in most of the industrialized world and the economic and social impact was incalculable, except for manufacturers of crutches, wheelchairs and iron lungs who quickly went out of business or began working on drones that could later be used in Afghanistan. . Most recently, the World Health Organization took offense at me and said they would kick me off the planet by 2005. In 1999, there were 7,141 cases worldwide and this dropped to 3,500 in 2000, a 99% decrease from the estimated 350,000 cases per year in 1988. Last year 550 million children under five years of age were immunized and this included India, where 152 million children were vaccinated in three days. This keeps the campaign on track towards a certified polio-free world by 2005.