Sixty years ago, Prince George was hit hard by polio with six cases reported.
As the regular front page stories from The Citizen during the summer and fall of 1954 show, the entire community was so terrified that the victims and where they lived were published in the newspaper in an effort to contain the spread of the horrific disease.
The first two cases of the year were city worker Sydney Howarth and his seven-year-old son David. Both were paralyzed. Howarth spent more than four months in the hospital and was a shadow of himself when he was discharged. He couldn't get out of bed without help because his core muscles were too weak to lift him up from laying down to a seated position. His legs were weak and shrunken, making it difficult for him to get in and out of cars.
When Howarth told Citizen readers what polio had done to him in a Feb. 21, 1955, front-page follow-up story, his son was still in hospital and was expected to be there for another two months. He wasn't walking yet and would likely never walk again normally because the disease had left him with a bowed back.
Howarth encouraged city residents to leave their porch light on the next night and donate generously for the Mother's March On Polio, an annual Kinsmen door-to-door campaign to raise money for the B.C. Polio Fund to help provide ongoing treatment for polio sufferers.
Polio was feared for centuries, right through to the mid-fifties, because of what the disease did. It struck quickly and had the power to lay low even the most healthy of individuals. It attacks the entire body, right down to the nerve centres, racking an individual with relentless pain. Sleep is elusive, Howarth told The Citizen, and when the body pain takes a short break, the mind fills with anxiety as you wonder if you will ever get better or whether you will be "an unending burden to your family."
For those who don't die, their bodies are defeated so completely that they need the infamous iron lung, a pressure chamber that lets polio sufferers breathe when even their lungs are paralyzed.
Just two months after the 1955 Mother's March On Polio in Prince George, the development of the Salk polio vaccine was announced. Immunize Canada reports that more than 76,000 cases of paralytic polio were reported in Canada, the U.S., the former Soviet Union, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand in 1955. By 1967, there were only 1,013 cases reported in the same countries, a 98.7 per cent decrease due to vaccination. Polio has not been seen in North or South America since 1991.
Despite the best efforts of the World Health Organization, Rotary International, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many others, polio is making a comeback in many poor and war-torn regions of the world. The WHO declared it an international public health emergency Monday, citing outbreaks in 10 countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Just 18 months ago, polio was finally gone from India and health officials believed they were close to eradicating the disease for good, having isolated it to just Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Polio returned to Syria last year, thanks to the endless civil war. From there, it has spread to Iraq and although a case hasn't been reported in Israel yet, the Associated Press reports that polio has been found in the water supply, which is one of the most common ways the disease spreads.
Most of the new cases are in Pakistan, where dozens of polio workers have been killed over the last two years by Islamic militants convinced the polio workers are actually American spies. Those deaths are the legacy of Osama bin Laden. After U.S. Special Forces killed him in his secret compound in a Pakistani town in 2011, it was disclosed that one of the ways intelligence agencies tried to confirm it was bin Laden holed up in the compound was to get blood samples from the kids inside as part of a fake hepatitis immunization program. Peter Bergen's book Manhunt explains that the idea didn't work but it made many Pakistanis deeply suspicious of vaccination efforts urged by Western governments and health agencies.
We are fortunate in Prince George to live without the fear of polio crippling and killing local residents. The resurgence of the disease in 2014 only means we should further step up our efforts to bring peace, stability, clean water and polio vaccines to vulnerable nations, in the hopes of making polio - along with smallpox - a disease no longer found anywhere on Earth.
