I see why you are concerned, and the recent trend against vaccination despite effective and cheap interventions is very disheartening. (I had forgotten about that NY episode, which they are claiming “did not originate” in the US.)
Fortunately, in Canada everything is under control, with nothing to see here…
I believe that currently ventilators or respirator therapy is used for most such situations. Remember how early in Covid-19 there were reports of hospitals running out of ventilators?
(And ventilators are designed mainly for short-term use now. But with polio, the damage often required assistance in breathing for the remainder of their life.)
There are alternatives that use positive air pressure to force air into the lungs. The negative pressure method of an iron lung simulates natural respiration better, but forces the patient to be lying down to work properly, and contained within the iron lung. The iron lung has a particular advantage over other systems, in the event of a power loss it can be operated by the user or an assistant with a mechanical crank. That must be a horrifying experience to endure.
@TriPolar and @Dr_Paprika, thanks for those informative responses. The gravity thing really makes sense.
I had forgotten about the sugar cube. I certainly ate mine!
And then it didn’t even taste good .
It sounds like Paul had a period of good years. He attended college and had a law career. He even tried cases in court. Had a social life and a fiancee.
All while spending a good portion of every day in a iron lung.
It was his later years that left him in that device almost full time.
As I recall, mine was a little tube of sweet tasting liquid.
I don’t recall getting the Sabin in any form, but I do remember the sucker I was given after getting the Salk shot (would have been shortly after it became widely available, so I’m guessing 1956). It was shaped like a (US) football, something I’ve never seen since.
I was born in 1961 so I probably got my vaccine in maybe 1966. What would I have gotten? An injection? I don’t remember a sugar cube. Can’t say if I did or didn’t get drops on the tongue.
I still remember that (smallpox?) injection gun the size of an atomic blaster. I think that thing inspired the Terminator.
My only memory of immunization is a long line at my elementary school. It stretched way into the hallway. 1st grade? Maybe 2nd.
Nurses came to the school and gave the shots with the needle gun.
Born in 1952; I remember being taken somewhere and standing in a long line to get a sugar cube which didn’t taste as sweet as I thought it would. And I just checked and the round scar on my arm is just barely visible; I remember my grandfather used to show us his scar, which was about the size of a quarter.
You might find this article interesting.
I wasn’t in the mood to sign up, kinda sleepy, can you please summarize?
Measles is happening in AZ along with Pertussis. When I got my last vaccination, I mentioned whooping cough to my shot giver and he had some very unkind things to say about the resurge and anti-vaxers.
I’ll pick the best excerpt.
Despite America’s fevered national conversation about vaccines, however, rates of uptake simply haven’t changed that much. Even with the recent divot in our national vaccine rates, the country remains in broad agreement on the value of immunity: 93 percent of America’s kindergartners are getting measles shots, a rate that has barely budged for decades. The sheer resilience of this norm should not be downplayed or ignored or, even worse, reimagined as a state of grace from which we’ve fallen. Our protection remains strong. In Florida, the surgeon general’s lackadaisical response to the crisis at the Broward County elementary school did not produce a single extra case of the disease, in spite of grim predictions to the contrary, almost certainly thanks to how many kids are already vaccinated.
At the same time, however, measles has been thriving overseas. Its reemergence in America is not a function of the nation’s political divides, but of the disease’s global prevalence. Europe had almost 60,000 cases last year, up from about 900 in 2022. The World Health Organization reports that the number of reported cases around the world surged to 306,000, after having dropped to a record low of 123,000 in 2021. As the pandemic has made apparent, our world is connected via pathogens: Large outbreaks in other countries, where vaccination coverage may be low, have a tendency to seed tiny outbreaks in the U.S., where coverage has been pretty high, but narrow and persistent cracks in our defenses still remain. (In 2022, more than half of the world’s unvaccinated infants were concentrated in just 10 countries; some of these are measles hotspots at this moment.) This also helps explain why so many Americans got measles in 2019. That was a catastrophic year for measles around the world, with 873,000 reported cases in total, the most since 1994. We had pretty good protection then, but the virus was everywhere—and so, the virus was here.
In high-income countries such as the U.S., Ferrari told me, “clustering of risk” tends to be the source of measles outbreaks more than minor changes in vaccine coverage overall. Even in 2019, when more than 95 percent of American kindergarteners were getting immunized, we still had pockets of exposure where protection happened to be weakest.
Thank you so much!
Living in a border state ATM does mean a larger number of people coming from outside the US and those children go to school as well.
Since countries are connected, it is worth mentioning the ten which underperform in getting measles immunizations without drawing any other unwarranted conclusions. They are often countries with very high populations and so their public health systems might still be generally robust. (From the source in the above excerpt.)
The 10 countries with the highest number of infants who did not receive MCV1 were Nigeria (3 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1.8 million), Ethiopia (1.7 million), India (1.1 million), Pakistan (1.1. million), Angola (0.8 million), Philippines (0.8 million), Indonesia (0.7 million), Brazil (0.5 million), and Madagascar (0.5 million). These 10 countries accounted for 55% of all children worldwide who did not receive MCV1. The top nine countries also had the highest number of children who had not received MCV1 in 2021 (Madagascar replaced Tanzania as the 10th country in 2022).
My paternal grandfather had polio, with a one-sided leg deformity. He died in the 1950’s before I was born. Some of my older cousins told a story that if my grandfather walked along a railroad track, he could walk fairly well by using his shorter leg stepping on the rail and his longer leg stepping on the ties.
I remember the polio sugar cube and the “atomic blaster” smallpox vaccination gun. If I look close in the mirror, I can still find a faint trace of the round scar, a bit smaller than a dime.
Measles vaccination rates vary a lot. Canada has an unacceptable rate of 90% (108th place), which is about the same as India (112th place). The United States does marginally better at 92% (103rd place). The vaccination rate of the countries with the biggest number of unvaccinated infants tend to have large populations and rates between 60-90%. Seventy-six countries have vaccination rates at or above 95%, including many like Rwanda (99%) which may be unexpected by some.