Opinion: Nobody could help the children with polio I saw growing up. Today, we could all choose to help.
Born as I was in Iowa in 1933, polio threatened for 30 years. Infected near Batavia, my cousin Marie, “a mild case,” limped all her life. So did friend Stu, and painfully. Another boy swung around Fairfield on double leg braces and crutches. One boy I never met, saw only once, except in memory.
Ottumwa’s hospital had a ward with “iron lungs,” one holding a boy about my age who could not breathe without it. But to me he was the machine’s prisoner. Although I fled the ward, that boy follows me still.
Years later, I lined up gratefully for drops of vaccine on a sugar cube, as eventually would much of the world. Polio virtually disappeared, except where poverty, corruption, or warfare prevailed. The problem is not ignorance.
Kids I knew as a youngster around Agency had a little smallpox vaccination scar. Those scars spread worldwide. Centuries of smallpox horrors were ended completely because of modern medicine and worldwide cooperation.
My wife and I each lost an Iowa grandfather we never met to the 1918-19 “Spanish Flu.” Nowadays, scientists constantly modify vaccines to counter a constantly evolving virus. That’s our annual flu shot. Like the flu, COVID-19 may not disappear, but scientists will continue to adapt vaccines to our own mutating virus.
Measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough. Suffering aside, few kids may have died, but schools were disrupted, and kids brought plagues into their neighborhoods. A young Fairfield woman I knew, pregnant, caught the measles. Her son was born deaf. My Aunt Irene, also pregnant, lost her son at birth. I knew a boy in Washington County who lost a testicle from the mumps.
Childhood diseases could be only memories. But hot spots continue, where enough people choose not to protect their kids — and other people’s kids. Unfortunately, a century and more of medical knowledge and experience cannot trump their online information, or that from their political advisers.
In our present worldwide pandemic, it is increasingly clear that effective vaccines have been created and will be adjusted to counter evolving viral strains. Now, when I see televised pandemic patients attached to machines upon which they are dependent for the breath of life, I think of that Ottumwa boy and his machine who seemed mated literally for life. His parents could not have known what to do, could not appeal to the family doctor, could find nothing in even professional literature to save their son.
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That is not true now. We could all choose the right path. We could all prevent further unnecessary suffering and death.
The tragedy of the polio and other early epidemics derived from awful helplessness. The tragedy of the current pandemic derives from awful deliberate choices.
Bruce Curtis was born in Wapello County and educated at Parsons College and the University of Iowa. He taught for 30 years at Michigan State University and is retired in Michigan.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Opinion: We can fight COVID-19, unlike polio when I was young
