StemCell Therapy

Although few called it polio at the time, an increasing number of Canadians had started to become aware of a mysterious cluster of cases of infantile paralysis in the fall of 1910.

In early September of that year, the Toronto Star reported that medical authorities attributed a recent local spate of infantile paralysis in young children to injuries. It had nothing to do, they said, with the cases reported in various places across the line in the United States, or in Hamilton, where a little girl had died of polio in August.

By December, it was no longer possible to deny it was part of a larger problem. Macleans (then called the Busy Mans Magazine) reported that there were ten little children suffering from infantile paralysis at a ward in the Hospital for Sick Children and connected it to outbreaks across Canada and around the world. Polio was hard to pin down, though, since its progression was wildly unpredictable.

With polio, no two cases were the same, explains Christopher J. Rutty, a professional medical/public historian and adjunct professor at the University of Torontos Dalla Lana School of Public Health. That epidemic was actually one of the closest parallels to COVID, especially in terms of the variability of impacts, from very mild to very severe.

Polios worldwide death toll was in the millions. In Canada, tens of thousands recovered but were left with some form of disability. Some developed flu-like symptoms after they were exposed to the polio virus and recovered relatively swiftly and easily. Some never developed symptoms at all; others started showing symptoms up to three weeks after exposure.

Just like with COVID-19, there was a sub-clinical factor to it, where people have it without realizing theyre affected, which helps it spread quite effectively, says Rutty. By the time you had paralytic cases in the area it had pretty well spread everywhere. So it took a long time to really get a handle on it, but its not really till the late 40s or early 50s that we started understanding the epidemiology.

For over four decades, between the earliest clusters of modern polio in the early 20th century and the Salk vaccine in the mid-1950s, people lived often terrified in its shadow. And there was no shortage of misinformation about transmission, prevention and cures, according to Gareth Williams, professor of medicine at the University of Bristol and author of Paralysed With Fear: The Story of Polio.

These ranged from the sensible to the bizarre, from barring children from theatres and pools to a panic over house pets that saw 70,000 cats and 8,000 dogs turfed from their homes and euthanized, despite public health departments reassurances that the pets were all right. All manner of homeopathic cures and tonics hit the market, as well as warnings that seafood, dairy or certain fruits and vegetable were to blame.

Several researchers prescribed big doses of vitamin C and one nutritionist, Benjamin Sandler, zeroed in on sugar and high-carb diets as the culprit in his book Diet Prevents Polio a theory pretty similar to the ones that back the new crop of corona-diets touted by various contemporary pundits in the COVID era.

Cutting back on sugar and/or upping vitamin C is one thing, but other tactics were more detrimental. In Texas, where many associated polio with houseflies, DDT was liberally sprayed in rivers, city streets and even on people. In Canada, one particularly popular preventative in the mid-1930s was a picric acid-alum nasal spray that was devised by Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. He thought polio entered the brain through the nose (it didnt), so the thing to do was to blast it with acid while it was still in the nose.

Flexner was basically king of American medical research in the 1920s and 1930s and, on the basis of not very good experiments, he decided that the polio virus got in through the nose, says Williams. So the whole thing about picric acid is that this is a nasty, nasty toxin. Even before they worked out just how carcinogenic it was, you could tell organic chemists because their fingers were often stained yellow with picric acid.

However awful and useless picric acid may have been, it was arguably better than some of the supposed cures, especially the red-hot poker cure and brain washout therapy. The first is as its name suggests, a procedure wherein paralyzed children were branded with a fire iron immediately above the vertebrae affected in the hopes that the inflammation would suck the virus out of the spinal cord through the skin. The brain washout saw a mild saline solution injected into an afflicted child with hopes the virus would pour out through a spinal tap inserted into their back.

You might ask yourself why on earth they did that, but the answer is that there was nothing else at all, says Williams. And the terrible thing about polio is that it was a disease that dropped out of a clear summer nights sky and lifted off kids that had been playing perfectly happily the day before. So youve got to put yourself in the place of parents who were desperate to do anything.

The good news is that science has come a long way since then. We know way more about viruses than we did circa 1910 to 1955, which makes it pretty unlikely that were 40-something years away from a vaccine. Even so, both our experts warn that no safe vaccine is likely to be widely available until early next year.

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Still, a year isnt the same as four decades. So we should be able to muster up some patience and resist the call of cures such as potentially toxic oleander or Miracle Mineral Supplement: a drinkable industrial bleach. Also and this is key to disregard the misinformation when we finally do get a safe vaccine.

Any vaccine is only going to work if people take it, says Williams. And you can already go online and find people rehearsing arguments for a vaccine that doesnt exist yet. So thats another area that I think people are going to have to watch very carefully.

See the original post:
How polio was the COVID-19 of its era, right down to the misinformation and bogus cures - TheSpec.com

This entry was posted on September 15, 2020 at 11:31 am and is filed under Preventative Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |