Philip Roth’s last novel, “Nemesis,” from 2010, tells the story of a twenty-three-year-old gym teacher, Bucky Cantor, in Newark, New Jersey, in the summer of 1944. He is working as a playground director for boys when the city is hit with an epidemic of polio. Polio eventually begins to ravage the playground. To stay safe, Bucky’s beloved girlfriend working as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp, convinces him to join her at the polio-free location. Reading like a slasher, polio eventually reaches the summer camp, taking kids one by one. During this, the reader is confronted with the central themes of pestilence: fear, panic, anger, guilt, bewilderment, suffering, pain, so forth. It’s not a pleasant read. A passage goes thus:
“Finally the cataclysm began – the monstrous headache, the enfeebling exhaustion, the severe nausea, the raging fever, the unbearable muscle ache, followed in another forty-eight hours by the paralysis.”
Once infected, the virus invades the nervous system and begins to destroy nerve cells which control the muscles, especially in the legs. If someone is paralysed by polio, there is a 10 percent chance they will die when the disease reaches their respiratory system. There is no cure.
“He was there for three weeks before he no longer needed catheterisation and enemas, and they moved him upstairs and began treatment with steamed woollen hot packs wrapped around his arms and legs, all of which were initially stricken.”
“He underwent four torturous sessions of the hot packs a day, together lasting as long as four to six hours. Fortunately his respiratory muscles hadn’t been affected, so he never had to be moved inside an iron lung to assist with his breathing, a prospect that he dreaded more than any other.”
The huge ventilator, which left only the head visible, kept polio victims alive for a number of weeks while they recovered from the illness – but those left permanently paralysed could spend their whole lives encased in one.
In 1952, Jonas Salk, one of the most influential people from the last century, developed an injectable polio vaccine. After that, cases in the US fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,300 in 1957.
The success of mass polio vaccination in the developed world led doctors and Rotary International to consider its potential elsewhere.
John Sever, head of the infectious disease branch at the US National Institutes of Health and a Rotary member, in 1979 proposed the idea to the group’s president, who wanted to develop a new project for Rotary that would involve the entire organisation.
Soon afterward, the legislative body that represents all Rotarians voted immunisation for the eradication of polio as their number one priority throughout the world.
Soon, through Rotary’s immunization efforts, the virus had been eradicated across the Americas – a remarkable feat that in 1988 led Rotary International and the World Health Organization to announce the goal of worldwide polio eradication.
Earlier this decade, the disease was only endemic in three countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. It looked like we were close to the year that the world would see the last case of polio with the disease fading into history.
We were close, but this year has had its setbacks. In fact, NY recently declared a state of emergency for a polio outbreak.
However, we are still close. The hope generated by this possibility is summed up in Roth’s novel when the protagonist listens to his grandmother reminisce about diseases of the past.
“His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria.”
“She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result. She pushed up the halfsleeve of her housedress and extended her arm to show it to everyone.”
She shows that scar with pride.
I never had to worry about any of these horrors thanks to vaccinations. Specifically for polio, I have Rotary, Sever, and Saulk, to thank for that.
