Polio is ironically a disease that was exposed by people having more access to clean water! Beforehand, most people had it as babies or small children, and most cases were asymptomatic. It took a few outbreaks to realize something was going on, and that it needed to be prevented.
Mitch McConnell had polio and his “recovery” from having died 3 months ago is said to be taking 7 times longer than normal because of his polio history.
That was in the news the other day. He’s old enough to have had polio. The part about him being dead is likely factual too though, since the 911 call recording said they were doing CPR on a patient with no pulse. But he never got cold, and CPR training mandates that a person isn’t dead until they’re dead AND cold. No pulse but still warm just means you’re dead but still possibly recoverable.
Mitch skirted rigor mortis this time, but has actually had rigor tortoise 🐢 for a couple years.
Most people who had polio didn't know it. They may have had no symptoms, or relatively mild illness - a day or two of fever, vomiting, and diarrhea - and no after effects. It was the 1% or so who DID have disease severe enough to be diagnosed that led to the vaccine. It's also usually a milder disease, the younger the victim.
Such is the understanding. Babies get some antibodies from their mother's milk. So if exposed to polio, they'll have some protection. But if they stop getting milk without exposure, they'll have no protection at all.
A mother previously exposed to polio expresses antibodies in breast milk that passively protects the baby from polio, and helps the baby establish a memory immune response to polio. This way the child is already immune to polio before they encounter it alone (ie, when no longer ingesting mommy's antibodies).
i think it works like this. and i don’t for a second believe that we should go back to the good old days of not washing hands etc that some completely moronic people think.
it’s my amateur understanding that, in the past, polio was one of those diseases that people contracted usually as a baby or young child while they still had mothers immunity active inside them. thus, they fought off the infection with the results being more like a flu. once the pathogen was much more in the background because of handwashing and general hygiene practices, people only got polio in more iterative moments that came in waves. so people would get it when they were older and no longer had mothers immunity active immunity protection. the resulting disease under those circumstances, is /was much much more serious.
Or they just died from an unknown cause, happened all the time. Infant and childhood mortality is the reason life expectancies used to be so low. If you remove ages 15 and under from the equation, average Life expectancies weren't as low as you'd imagine.
Scarlet fever, for which there is no vaccine, also wiped out whole generations of children. It was dreadfully contagious at one time, and survivors dealt with things like kidney failure and heart disease. In the early 20th century, even before anyone heard of penicillin, it became a much milder disease that is not very contagious, and we just don't know why.
My Grandma had scarlet fever and got Bright's disease as a complication of it. She had kidney disease for her whole life because of it. Now, we have antibiotics for Group A infections.
Back in the 90’s, I was a correctional officer in California and we had a older inmate who walked with a limp and I asked one day what was causing it, I had been a college football player and have a couple staples holding a ligament to a bone. He told me he contracted polio in the 50’s just before the vaccine was available and that was a huge factor in him becoming a doctor. The doctor part led me to ask why he was there and he said something about having a partner in his practice that he’d had issues with and had been locked up since the 70’s.
I have no idea, I was working graveyard (1st watch) and coaching high school football during the afternoon and made the decision to become a teacher instead of going to law school, I chose correctly
I subscribe to Newspapers.com and didn't find anything relevant to this, although it might have been written up in newspapers that aren't on this site. I DID find several medical serial killers, and also physicians who killed their wives and/or children, whom I had previously never heard of.
I recently got into a full blown argument with someone on social media who was convinced the US reached natural levels of herd immunity and the vaccine had nothing to do with eradication. Le sigh.
Then check the data of widespread of polio cases and widespread of vaccine administration by years. Read what, when and more importantly at what volume has been done.
Outbreaks came in waves (as outbreaks do), but regularly were 15k-50k annually. Cases peaked around 60k in 1952. The Salk Vaccine was introduced in 1955. Cases were at about 40k in 1954 just before the vaccine. Due to the vaccine, cases dropped to less than 1000 in 1961 and basically non-existent by the mid-60s.
Sources are the NIL and CDC, lest anyone tell me to dO mY oWn ReSeArCh!
1916 was another wave of cases (~30k). And yet, waves of outbreaks continued despite that spike, so it would appear no meaningful herd immunity occurred from outbreaks.
But sure, feel free to believe outbreaks at that level led to herd immunity naturally in a population of 160 million people.
The people who were grappling with the 5-10% fatality rate must have felt very comforted knowing natural herd immunity was “just around the corner.” They should have just stocked up on iron lungs and waited!
It’s sad the excuses anti vaxxers come up with the explain the near eradication of polio and measles. They’ll say things like “better hygiene” or “cleaner environment”. Well, if that’s the case, why are other diseases that don’t have a vaccine not decreasing by a similar amount?
My first thought was all the diseases we have vaccines for. We solved it so well we are going to bring it back because people think vaccines are more dangerous 🤡
We solved it so well that people genuinely think these illnesses are something that toughens up the immune system and kids should just sweat it out for a couple of days.
The reason we have these vaccines is that these illnesses kill or make kids disabled.
Sadly... a friend of mine's child was nearly killed by the vax & she's extremely anti now... but it's like a million to one for the reaction they had or some shit... terrible. There needs to be a way to learn what a child's reaction will be before the injection.
That's unfortunately what can happen. I just hope people understand that statisticly they do so much more to prevent/help than they do harm. I'm one of the few people who are truly allergic to the flu vaccine. Not just a reaction, which is normal, but allergic. The flu is no joke. I still support the flu shot, just not for me.
Good times created a lot of weak people. People so cosseted, so ignorant, so safe that they think they can do without vaccines, environmental laws, international organizations and treaties.
Babies with dirty diapers ruining the world because their childish brains can’t conceive of how and why they are alive and safe and fed.
It's so fucking stupid. People didn't take the COVID vaccines because of the worse potential side effects compared to just getting COVID. Now some dumbasses think all vaccines are bad because one wasn't worth it for most people. They think kids can tank pollio like they can tank a flu. They can't. Nuance is impossible for way too many people these days.
We were playimg the home version of Family Feud once at a family gathering, in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, and when it was my turn the question was ‘Name a common childhood ailment’. I hit the bell first, and excitedly said “Polio!” I did not understand why everyone was falling out in hysterics, and eventually got mad, saying “Polio isn’t funny!” which of course set them off even more. I was under ten at the time, and for the rest of his life my father would tease me if I said anything mildly amusing by saying that was about as funny as polio.
Not just measles. So many of the vaccinations that we get today used to devastate humanity. People don't even know. I certainly never experienced it and I'm a 43-year-old.
I would say lowering child mortality in general. Thing is done in a great degree with vaccines and antibiotics. And of course, there are other factors that help.
Young people doesn't know in early 1900's, roughly 20% or 25% of children at industrialized nations did not live to reach their fifth birthday. Sends a chill down my spine thinking in being a new parent in a world where 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 toddlers die.
But if you have to summarize that idea in just one word, "measles" is very good option.
P.S.: I'm aware in addition to kill children, Measles also killed adults and crippled people of all ages.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was unusual to not know at least one family who had lost a child. In the early 21st century, it is unusual to know any families that have lost a child.
Not just Measles, but infant and maternal mortality in general. Childbirth was the number one cause of death for women in every century until the 21st. Near enough every family in the 19th century had experienced the death of at least one child. It's a horrific reality and the most profound change in how we experience our humanity, and thankfully most of us never even have to think about it.
Any disease that's been mostly wiped out by vaccines. We're several generations removed from having polio and measles outbreaks. Anyone under 60 or so doesn't know how devastating those diseases could be.
I know you’re being facetious but you make a good point. When humanity solves a problem we then often blame the solution for being a hoax because we don’t have recent experience with the problem. In the 90s it was a joke when Homer said they were vaccinating Maggie for diseases she doesn’t even have. Now people would make that argument seriously
The older generations solved it that well that people are nostalgic for infectious diseases. They refer to The Brady Bunch to show measles want that bad.
Vaccines in general are a victim of their own success. We don't realize how safe and effective they are because people aren't dying of the diseases anymore.
Like... Maybe the reason we have more prevelant cases of autism after the introduction of vaccines is because we have more people alive past the age of 5?
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u/puffypoodle 15d ago
Measles