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It seems like an appropriate time to run his compelling story now, with most of the country’s schools closed because of the global spread of the novel coronavirus known as covid-19, and with millions of Americans hunkering down at home, fearful of getting sick.

By Larry Cuban.

San Angelo is in West Texas, the county seat between Abilene and the Mexican border. Farms, oil wells and cattle ranches fenced with barbed wire dot the county. Blessed with a warm climate and reputation as a healthy place to live, in one year San Angelo added to its reputation in ways that city leaders dreaded.*

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In mid-spring, the newspaper reported that a local child had come down with a viral disease. Previously, when this disease occurred, it had not spread. This one, however, did.

Parents began arriving at Shannon Memorial Hospital with “feverish, aching youngsters in their arms,” the local newspaper reported. Within days these children died: 10-month-old Esperanza Ramirez, 7-year-old Billie Doyle Kleghorn, 4-year-old Susan Barr and others.

The city health officer said that an epidemic was occurring. Because the disease had no known cause or prevention or cure, he recommended that San Angelo children avoid crowds, wash their hands regularly and get a lot of rest.

A month later, with known cases spiking to over 60, the city council voted to close all indoor meeting places, including theaters and churches. Tourists stopped coming to the city. The economy shrank. One local doctor said, “We got to the point … when people would not even shake hands.”

The year is 1949, not 2020. The disease is polio, not covid-19.

I got polio in 1944, five years before the epidemic hit San Angelo. But I was lucky. I came out of the disease with only a limp from a destroyed calf muscle.

Amid the fears of the coronavirus today, I can now appreciate in a way that I could not as a 10-year-old the dread of the unknown consequences for their son that my parents had after I came down with the “plague,” as it was called at the time.

What was true about polio is also true of the novel coronavirus: Experts are not exactly sure how covid-19 began, and testing for the disease continues to be slow in the United States. There are no known medications to ease or a vaccine to prevent it. Even the death rate from the disease is uncertain because of flaws in testing and tardiness in evaluating large numbers of people in China and other countries as the epidemic became a pandemic. Political and medical officials advise Americans to wash their hands often and stay away from crowds. Anxieties and fears are as contagious as the disease’s spread from its origins in China to the rest of the world.

Now as an old man, the fear I have of the coronavirus striking my family friends, and the nation must be close to what my parents must have felt when I got polio three-quarters of a century ago.

Polio virus.

Known for centuries but isolated in the early 1900s, the virus that causes polio had triggered epidemics across the world. Because it was not known why children and adults got sick, became paralyzed and died, prevention was useless. Fear of contagion was rampant wherever cases broke out. Treatment for the disease, often called “infantile paralysis,” was a combination of muscle wrappings and massage of limbs to ease damage to the body that inevitably occurred.

In the United States, epidemics occurred periodically, paralyzing children and adults, rich and poor alike. One epidemic in 1916 claimed 27,000 Americans; in New York alone, there were 8,400 cases and 2,400 deaths. Five years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came down with the disease at the age of 39 and wore leg braces for the rest of his life including the years he served as U.S. president (1933-1945). Not until the early 1950s did a vaccine become available for children.

The polio epidemic of 1944 swept across Pittsburgh. I caught it. I remember well the weeks I was in the hospital and the months that I was at home.

I recall the anxiety and fears that my parents and brothers had — I was the youngest in the family — since the paralysis could cause loss of breathing (“iron lungs” were invented to keep children and adults alive) and destroy muscles. Both of my brothers had been drafted — it was the third year of World War II — and were serving in the U.S. Navy and Air Force. My parents were worried about them and then I came down with polio. Friends and neighbors steered clear of our home.

My most vivid memory was my mother massaging my legs with cocoa butter in the hospital. I could not walk after I returned home and daily she would rub my legs with it. I missed a few months of junior high school and when I returned, I had a noticeable limp. The smell of cocoa butter has remained fixed in my head ever since.

So too have I remembered drinking raw eggs every morning before I went to junior high school. Because my leg muscles and body wasted during confinement for polio in the hospital and at home, doctors had told my parents that I needed proteins to rebuild muscle strength.

Jeffery DelViscio

Jeffery DelViscio is the senior multimedia editor in charge of video at Scientific American.

Karen M. Sughrue

Karen M. Sughrue is a senior producer at Retro Report. Karen has worked as a producer at 60 Minutes, where her stories included the growing knowledge gap with American boys falling behind girls in school, an exposé of the U.S. military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and the impact of the one-child policy on Chinese society today. Karen also served as Executive Producer of CBS News Face the Nation and Berlin Bureau Chief covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.

Due to delays in vaccinations, diphtheria-tetanus-whole-cell-pertussis (DTP) is often given with or after measles vaccine (MV) – out of sequence. We reanalysed data from Matlab, Bangladesh, to examine how administration of MV and DTP out-of-sequence was associated with child survival.

36,650 children born between 1986 and 1999 were followed with registration of vaccinations and survival. Controlling for background factors using Cox proportional hazards models, survival was analysed between 9 and 24 months of age. We measured the mortality rate ratio (MRR) to compare vaccination groups. Oral polio vaccine (OPV) campaigns, which started in 1995, reduced the mortality rate and reduced the difference between vaccination groups. In the main analysis, we therefore censored for OPV campaigns; there were 151 non-accidents deaths before the OPV campaigns.

Compared with MV administered alone (MV-only), DTP administered with or after MV had MRR 2.20 (1.31-3.70), and DTP-only had MRR 1.78 (1.01-3.11). Compared with MV-only, DTP administered with MV had a female-male MRR 0.56 (0.13-2.38), significantly different to DTP administered after MV which had MRR 14.83 (1.88-117.1), test of interaction p=0.011. Compared with having DTP (no MV) as most recent vaccination, MV-only had a non-accident MRR of 0.56 (0.32-0.99).

The negative effects of non-live DTP with or after live MV are not explained merely by selection bias. These observations support a live-vaccine-last policy where DTP should not be given with or after MV.