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American Ingenuity Beat the Polio Outbreak—So Why Risk Letting It Return?
When Paul woke up, he couldn’t move. He couldn’t talk; he could scarcely breathe. A tent surrounded him, too foggy to see through. The humidity was supposed to help, but in the damp darkness he felt only fear. Then came the nurse. She took the tent away, but revealed something even more horrific. In a scene that predates the Matrix movie by fifty-odd years, Paul looked out into a sea of metal cases, each containing a human being, each plugged in to the machinery. Only their heads poked through the apparatus, floating and seemingly disembodied. Rows and rows, as if without end, of children just like Paul.
These memories were recorded for an article in 2020, just as Covid began to ravage the US population. Paul Alexander didn’t suffer from Covid, however; the then-74-year-old instead described the illness that forever changed his life: polio, or poliomyelitis. He’d contracted the disease in 1952 — and he still used his iron lung, the heavy contraption he’d awoken in all those years ago. In fact, he used it until the day he died, on March 11, 2024.
Polio kills by suffocating its victims, but not by directly attacking the lungs. The virus paralyses, stealing the ability to walk, to move, and at last to breathe.
The massive metal canisters that so terrified Paul also helped to save his life and that of other children, by compressing the air out of their lungs and then sucking it back in again, on their behalf. Some children recovered. Some died. Some lived but with badly disfigured and semi-paralyzed limbs or chest muscles too weak to allow them to breathe on their own ever again.
Polio swept through towns and cities every year, but in 1952, the United States saw the worst epidemic outbreak in our history. Over three thousand children died. More than 20,000 were left paralyzed. Hospitals…
