Poliomyelitis was declared an epidemic in the early 1950s in the United States. It caused primarily children and young adults to develop paralysis, led to social stigma around being crippled. To this day there is still no cure for this disease, poliomyelitis can only be prevented with vaccination.
Poliomyelitis is a virus that infects the nerves of the spinal cord, and brain which leads to paralysis and or death (Piddock, 2004). Poliomyelitis is best known today as Polio, and Infantile Paralysis. Tonsillectomy polio would take over the lymph nodes in order to spread the infection throughout the body, leading to muscle paralysis in the limbs, and in some cases respiratory failure. Bulbar polio was a much more severe form, it affected the top of the spinal cord which caused paralysis and inability to swallow fluids (Rifkind, 2005). Polio was transmitted through ingesting materials contaminated by the virus found in feces. Children would play in public swimming pools, and ingest the contaminated water which lead to infection (Piddock, 2004). After the person ingested the virus, it would travel their intestinal tract, and eventually compromise their lymph nodes, making them unable to fight off the virus. Symptoms were like those of the flu, such as fever, headache, and upset stomach. The minority of people were able to let the virus run its course and it would be passed through their feces like any other virus. Others weren’t so lucky, those with compromised immune systems were unable to fight off the virus, the lymph nodes would fail to protect the nervous system causing paralysis once it reached the spinal cord (Piddock, 2004). Poliomyelitis has since then been eliminated in the United States because of the polio vaccine that is giv...
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...es and eradicate the virus from the United States. Consequently, there will always be social stigma against any sickness no matter what century, and those who lived through the polio epidemic are able to testify that fear is the root of all stigma.
Works Cited
National Museum of American History: Polio. Smithsonian Institute, 2005. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. .
Piddock, Charles. "Winning the War on Polio." Current Health 2 10 2004: 25-7. ProQuest. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Rifkind, David, and Geraldine L. Freeman. The Nobel Prize Winning Discoveries in Infectious Diseases. London: Elsevier/Academic, 2005.
Wilson, Daniel J. "Braces, Wheelchairs, And Iron Lungs: The Paralyzed Body And The Machinery Of Rehabilitation In The Polio Epidemics." Journal Of Medical Humanities 26.2/3 (2005): 173-190. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Polio, formerly known as poliomyelitis, an infectious viral disease that affects the central nervous system and can cause temporary or permanent paralysis. A debilitating disease that was once the affliction of our very own republic. David Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story chronicles polio’s progression in the United States, a feat it does quite well throughout the course of the novel.
Moreover polio is a deadly disease that is caused by a highly contagious virus entering the nervous system in the brain or spinal cord causing temporary or permanent paralysis. There are three
Polio: An American Story describes a struggle to find a vaccine on polio through several researchers’ lives, and over the course of many years. The second thesis is the struggle between Salk and Sabin, two bitter rivals who had their own vaccine that they believed would cure polio. The author David M. Oshinsky, is describing how difficult it was to find the cure to a horrifying disease, which lasted from the Great Depression until the 1960’s. Oshinsky then writes about how foundations formed as fundraisers, to support polio research. Lastly, the author demonstrates how researchers were forced to back track on multiple occasions, to learn more about polio.
Jonas Salk, a virologist at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), used inactivated viruses (virus particles grown in culture and then killed by a form of heat) to create a polio vaccine. Salk drew blood from about two million children, which the NFIP checked for immunization. Through the collection of many HeLa cells and trial and error, the polio vaccine was ready in a year.... ... middle of paper ... ...
We may not have eradicated all of the stubborn philosophies about physically challenged individuals, American society has greatly enhanced since the 1920s. More of us understand the diversity in each other, and that many conditions affect people differently. The Polio Journals brightens that path of progress and sheds light on how far there is yet to travel. I highly recommend this read, and I look forward to gaining more insight into the eyes of
...nd make people aware that it is more common than people realize and that a rather large part of America has the illness, whether they know it or not. This paper also discussed how the virus, could target certain individuals more easily than others based on the genetic makeup of an individual and families.
One of the other notable important advances was the “Conquest of Polio” this disease usually caused paralysis in the people who contracted the virus. Back then there...
Poliomyelitis was the term used by doctors to describe the condition in which the gray (polios) anterior matter of the spinal chord (myelos) was inflamed (-itis). Until a cure was discovered, no one had the slightest idea where "polio" had come from or why it paralyzed so many children. People learned later that, oddly enough, it was the improved sanitary conditions which caused children to be attacked by the virus. Since people were no longer in contact with open sewers and other unsanitary conditions which had exposed them to small amounts of the polio virus as infants, when paralysis is rare, the dis...
In the United States there was a vicious enemy everyone feared. In the 1950s the United States was under attack by the ruthless Poliomyelitis virus. Americans lived in constant fear of their children contracting this horrible virus that left many children paralyzed. During the outbreaks in the 1950s foundations were created to fund research and create awareness to help find a way to eradicate the virus. Americans become focused on doing anything in their power to fight this virus off. Jonas Salk’s Exploration of Medicine and research led to the creation of the Polio vaccine that united the country, prevented further outbreaks, and introduced a new form of treatment which has limited the fatality of polio infections today.
Symptoms of this plague are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, and stiffness in the neck and pain in the limbs. But even though the polio virus does have symptoms about 90% of people do not experience any symptoms at all, which makes them very susceptible to unknowingly spreading the disease to love ones or strangers playing in his poop. Of those infected with polio only .05% of people come out with any major paralysis. And of the people that have been paralyzed only 5% to 10% will died from the respiratory system being paralyzed. Polio is transmitted from person to person through direct contact to the virus, and because the vast majority of people affected by polio are in developing countries, people don’t wash their hands after handling the disease which provides it another way of transmitting it. And because the disease lives in the intestine for the majority of its life, the only way to directly contact the virus is through stool samples. Doctors can tell that the disease affecting a person is polio through the symptoms and a stool sample. (Who, 2014).
Palfreman, J. (Director) (2010). The vaccine war [Television series episode]. In Fanning, D. (Executive Producer),FRONTLINE. PBS. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/view/
When hygienic conditions were poor polio attacked infants. The disease was spread by contaminated water and contact with fecal contamination. Many infants died when the conditions were poor. But as conditions improved the virus spread differently. It was spread more through playmates and family members, the contamination came from the nose and throat. By the early 1950s, twenty-five percent of paralytic cases occurred in people 21 years old or older.
The term Poliomyelitis epidemic or infantile paralysis became popular because of it effects in children. Polio became the short version of poliomyelitis. Polio is a virus but not a bacterium. Once a child becomes infected, after three to six days, the child would develop symptoms such as a cold with a headache, sore throat, fever, vomiting, and even have fever before becoming paralyzed (in some cases). Victims would feel stiffness at the joins of the neck, back, and legs and even becomes total paralysis on their arms, legs, or the whole body, or even died (Trevelyan, Smallman_Raynor, & Cliff, 2005). Some children who got the poliovirus were kept out from the crowd; they were not allowed to go anywhere and as a result felt lonely because no
The question being asked over and over again, “Can polio be eradicated by 2018?” Although this is the goal for the world, is this goal realistic? No one knows the answer for sure or even necessarily the right way to go about doing this. There are many ideas and opinions about if this can happen. I believe that it is going to be very difficult to eradicate polio by 2018. There are a lot of obstacles that need be overcame before this can happen. Obstacles with getting vaccines to everyone, violence in many countries, and people’s willingness to get the vaccination are only a few of the obstacles that are being faced right now.
For innumerable centuries, unrelenting strains of disease have ravaged society. From the polio epidemic in the twentieth century to the measles cases in the latter half of the century, such an adverse component of nature has taken the lives of many. In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that exposure to cowpox could foster immunity against smallpox; through injecting the cowpox into another person’s arm, he founded the revolutionary concept known as a vaccination. While many attribute the eradication of various diseases to vaccines, many United States citizens are progressively beginning to oppose them. Many deludedly thought that Measles had been completely terminated throughout the United States; however, many children have been patronized by