Speaking of polio, mothers may be unfamiliar. But speaking of its other name, polio, you can certainly recall one or two things about the disease.
Sick children are crippled for a lifetime in light cases and lose their lives in heavy cases.
Poliomyelitis is a serious disease that children are prone to. The disability brought by it is like the shadow of childhood, which accompanies the child all his life.
The sugar pill to prevent poliomyelitis, with candy-like sweetness, dispels the haze brought to human beings by poliomyelitis.
The coincidence of all this is too cruel to accept. The invention of polio vaccine has a fairy tale color.
Therefore, today, Clove Mother wants to focus on a fairy tale-style painting to popularize polio with everyone.
First, it is like a childhood nightmare.
Candy-built houses, elves and talking animals, walking on the clouds… In my memory, even as a child, I will feel that there are countless exaggerated passages.
If [fairy tale phenomenon] is applied to poliomyelitis or poliomyelitis patients, it is a nightmare that has been mired in it since childhood and cannot wake up.
Poliomyelitis mostly occurs in children under the age of 5. Because the immune function is not yet mature, infants have a higher risk of contracting poliovirus before reaching the age of 6 months.
Poliovirus spread through the ordinary fecal-hand-mouth route and once swept across the United States. In 1916, 6,000 people died of polio and 27,000 were paralyzed.
Such pandemics occur every few years and the prevalence is increasing. By 1952, 57,000 polio cases had been reported.
Second, children can walk only by crutches.
Poliomyelitis, as its name implies, is a lesion caused by attack on the butterfly gray matter in the center of the spinal cord.
Most of the surviving children were disabled.
Like a winged fairy, cursed by a witch who is jealous of her. The beautiful butterfly wings became smaller butterflies and flew away. From then on, she could never fly to the sky again.
The cruel witch even turned their legs into a bunch of Phalaenopsis, weak enough to support walking. Poor little flower fairy can only walk on crutches.
Usually this [curse] will only affect the motor system on one side of the body, that is, even if the child can walk upright, he will become limping.
Three, even don’t have the strength to breathe
But if the polio virus invades the medulla oblongata respiratory center, it will be even more difficult. At this time, the muscles used to breathe have become petals, too fragile to breathe autonomously.
The iron lung, a machine that helps seriously ill patients breathe, was invented in the 1930s.
The patient lies horizontally in the iron lungs, and the machine makes them work by squeezing and stretching the muscles. Lying in this huge machine is like being in the deep sea of tens of thousands of meters. The loud noise of the machine is like a wailing sound from the bottom of the sea, penetrating the eardrum.
The muscles of these seriously ill patients are paralyzed to the point that they cannot even speak. Once the machine breaks down, they can only rely on their tongues to attract the attention of nurses.
How long does this assisted breathing last? The answer is lifetime.
For children, it may be a day counted by two hands. It is cruel and not fairy tale at all.
But is this life desperate? Not really.
For the seriously ill, the life without iron lung is the real place in the deep sea, with no air at all.
Is such a happy life? Not really.
People who have lived in this kind of machinery since childhood may not even have the concept of what others call “normal life”.
Polio is still a cripple disease, more patients are poor, only a small number of patients have been admitted to iron lung, and the old ones have not been added since decades ago, and the old ones have been sealed off for use. This is really a heavy [good] thing.
Four, even the president, also doomed
Poliovirus only likes children very much, but that doesn’t mean it won’t attack adults.
In the summer of 1921, a prominent New Yorker contracted polio.
Even if he was re-elected to four terms as president of the United States, disability will always follow him. He was 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
As far as we know, he only left two photos of himself in a wheelchair.
Although Roosevelt seemed unwilling to mention his disability, he still promised to help those victims like him.
Roosevelt issued an initiative on the radio, calling on everyone to send 10 cents (10 cents) to the president to [lead, direct and unify the fight against polio, killing and disability].
From 1938 to 1962, a total of 630 million US dollars were collected.
It is these starry coins collected from the public that pave the way for polio-sized patients to go home so that they no longer need to be isolated in impenetrable rooms as they did when the epidemic broke out.
Five, the vaccine appeared, the child finally woke up from the nightmare
After consuming a lot of manpower and materials, the first effective vaccine against poliovirus appeared.
This is the poster of the 1955 [One Person, Ten Dimes] campaign. The girl on the left is polio patient: Mary Kozroski, and Randy Cole, the first American vaccinated person.
The two of them represent the two goals of the movement-treatment and cure.
Then, sugar pills, an oral vaccine that is more popular with children, also came out.
The widespread use of sugar pills around the world has dispelled the nightmare of children [cripple polio] by the sweetness of candy.
Six, opponents of vaccines, let children tread on thin ice
Now, a few decades later, the so-called “anti-vaccine” voice is widespread in European and American countries.
This is a wave created by Western culture, beliefs and even political environment. Domestic people may not be able to understand its hundreds of years of history.
Over the past hundred years, repeated rumours have not killed the anti-vaccine campaign.
Some parents think that vaccines will make children autistic. Even if the relevant literature has been proved wrong as early as 2011, fear is still spreading wildly through the Internet.
There are three types of poliovirus. At present, type 2 virus has been eliminated, but types 1 and 3 still exist in a few countries.
In reality, candy and coins are not enough to pave the road at all. What supports the children below is a thin layer of ice-our children are still walking on the ice.
Until today, after the occurrence of paralytic poliomyelitis, there is still no effective treatment to restore children’s motor nerves.
Through extensive vaccination, the incidence of polio in the world has decreased by more than 99% in the past 30 years. The number of polio-endemic countries has decreased from 125 to 3.
Tens of millions of people who might have been paralyzed can now walk normally.
Now is the best time for us to completely eliminate this terrible but preventable disease.