POLIOMYELITIS TAKES ITS TOLL YEAR BY YEAR

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 25, 24 April 1950, Page 6

POLIOMYELITIS TAKES ITS TOLL YEAR BY YEAR

Nearly every year polio—poliomyelitis, to use its full j name — sweeps through many communities in many countries, exacting its grim toll in dead and crippled. If is usually toward the end of the summer or the beginning of autumn that health authorities began to watch for signs of an increase in the number of polio cases reported.

What Is Known What do medical men know today about poliomyelitis? Or, equally important in this case, what don’t they know? How is polio spread from community to community and from person to person? Can it be prevented: Is everyone who gets it paralysed? How can the risk of getting polio be lessened?

Actually, polio is one of. the commonest infections of man, although the disease itself with its typical features is comparatively rare. It is a good guess that at one time or another in their lives about threefourths of the world’s population have had contact with the tiny germ, known as a virus, which causes polio. N As yet no one knows for sure how polio'spreads. There is general agreement that most of it is\ due to person-to-person contacts. But tracing the germ is extremely difficult, since the vast majority of persons infected show either no symptoms at all or only very ordinary ones such as a sore throat and a slight fever. Saliva is probably the main source of infection, v/hile sewage, insects, food and water are believed to be of only slight importance as a means of spreading the disease. Most specialists, therefore, think today that closing down all schools, kindergartens, cinemas and bathing pools when polio breaks out is an unnecessary and unsuccessful disturbance of community life. More important, they believe, are the avoidance of over-fatigue, of chilling; and the need, in areas where there is polio, to consider any illness as polio and to insist on complete bed-rest until the patient has been properly examined. Curious Fact A curious fact is that polio outbreaks seem especially severe in countries with high standards of living, while they are much less frequently' reported from countries where sanitation is poor. This may indicate, scientists believe, that children who first come into contact with the polio virus while they are still protected by the immunities passed along to them by their mothers (that is, for about the first year of life, particularly if the •child has been breast-fed) are least likely to be stricken by the paralytic form of the disease in later life.

Research on these difficult problems is going forward in many countries today along clearly defined lines.