I recently made an eclectic trip down an Internet rabbit hole and learned something about viral infections. The rabbit hole opened as a Facebook ad for a mystery-thriller that featured a Dorothea Lang photograph. That image was of a crossroads store in 1939 North Carolina and depicted the crowded front porch of that store complete with Texaco pump, Chesterfield, Camel, Coca Cola, and Sweet Scotch Snuff signs. I zigged my way past the mystery offering and headed toward the Depression Era photographer, Dorothea Lang. It was here I learned that she had contracted polio at age seven and walked through most of her life with a partially paralyzed right leg. At that age, the year would have been around 1902.
Dorothea had an interesting life and her photographic coverage of Depression Era migrants produced some of the most iconic imagery of that period. Her Migrant Mother is instantly recognizable. It is her later life where I found my next turn in the rabbit labyrinth. She developed PPS or post-polio syndrome that affects 40 to perhaps 80 percent of those who had polio. It typically attacks 30 to 35 years after the initial exposure and can even develop in people with NPP or non-paralytic polio.
I bring this up as someone who grew up in a time of polio infections in the pre-Salk vaccine period. Three of the children on my block got polio and were crippled for life. I was playing a board game with one of them (Billie-Lynn Fig) when she realized she couldn’t stand up. When I last saw each of them, they were all wearing special shoes with metal braces to support their crippled legs and were using crutches for mobility. It wouldn’t be until March 26, 1953, that Dr. Jonas Salk would announce on national radio that he had developed a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis infections.
While there may have been some anti-vaxxers in the 50s, I didn’t know any. Certainly not on my block. We rushed to get vaccinated and we were thankful to have that threat removed from the list of things that could go wrong. We could go back to our duck and cover drills in schools and the tests of the air-raid sirens that would tell us we were all about to be incinerated in an atomic bomb attack.
If we climb back out of the rabbit hole and into the light, we find ourselves once again facing a debilitating and sometimes deadly disease. I applaud those of you who are vaccinated against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. For those of you who are unvaccinated, please reconsider. Getting ill with this disease, even if you recover, can have lasting effects. We have all heard of the long haulers with lingering SARS CoV-2 symptoms. If the viral experience of polio sufferers is any guide, even decades from now, your life may be threatened once again. We also have the experience of shingles that is linked to the varicella-zoster virus known as chickenpox. Decades after having chickenpox, people can come down with painful shingles. PPS and shingles are but two diseases that are known to have possible long-term problems.
Those who contract Post-Polio Syndrome, have an overall mortality rate of 25% due to respiratory paralysis. We can only hope that a PPS-like residual infection will not strike recovered Covid-19 individuals, we just don’t know yet. We know that this vaccine is as safe as any vaccine can be and it is effective in preventing serious illness in you and it reduces your ability to spread the virus to others.
GET VACCINATED!
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