THE HISTORY OF THE POLIOMYELITIS VIRUS

Adapted from a satire by Dr Patrick Treacy for the Irish Medical News in 2001

I am “poliomyelitis virus” -

and I have inhabited this planet for many more years than I care to remember.

I was already celebrating my 600th birthday with the ancient Egyptians long before 3100BC. In fact, the finding of misshapen bones in some mummies show that I have been around and left my mark.

I must have liked the sunsets over the Nile, because you’ll see me if you look at the stone relief of 1500 BC - those poor priests with their atrophied short legs, their muscle-wasting, their crippled bone-growth.

Anyway, I decided I needed a Greek holiday and arrived there about the beginning of the fourth century. and who did I run into? The great Hippocrates himself! I am even mentioned in his latest book under the title of ‘infant paralysis’.

By the way, my name is Greek - polios - (gray), myel - (marrow) and itis - (inflammation).

I was there with the Romans but as the Roman Empire fell, unwashed barbarians descended upon my cities, looting and burning books.

So I went with the Irish, and the Celtic physicians called me ‘the pestilence that is called lameness’.

For centuries I remained a mild disease, often ignored by physicians, until some bright spark abandoned the chamber pot for the modern flush toilet, unwittingly transformed me into a paralysing agent of epidemic proportion.

In 1916 I crossing the Atlantic to check out the new flushing toilets in New York! I befriended thousands of young children in the city and panic erupted as thousands of families fled from Manhattan.

By the end of the summer, 2,000 Manhattan children were dead, and I had paralysed 9,000 others.

By the time of the Great Depression, I was the most feared disease known on the planet and wherever sanitation improved, I had people hobbling around on crutches, rolling about in wheelchairs, lying immobile in giant iron lungs.

Things got so bad that President Franklin Roosevelt actually declared a war on me. The tremendous resources of post-war America were brought to bear in trying to develop a vaccine against me.

They tried mixing me with various chemicals and putting me in a fridge for two weeks. The new ‘attenuated’ virus, I was called.

Salk also dipped me in Formaldehyde, but he also heated me up in an effort to find my weak spot. You would have thought that after all those summers in Egypt and Greece, I would have been a bit more used to the heat.

In 1952 Salk inoculated his wife and three sons with his mixture and they all began producing antibodies against me - and not one of them got sick!

In 1952, I befriended over 57,628 people, making it the worst polio year yet in USA. So in 1955 they decided to start mass vaccination of schoolchildren.

By the early 1960s, I was on the run, and when Albert Sabin started to produce different oral versions of me, I decided to go into hiding.

By 1964, approximately 100 million Americans had taken Sabin’s vaccine on sugar cubes. This oral version really had me licked in Western Society.

Soon, I was only a memory in most of the industrialised world. The makers of iron lungs quickly went out of business.

I retreated to Third World countries such as Africa.

More recently, the World Health Organisation and Rotary have taken umbrage against me and thought they would smoke me out and run me off the planet by 2005.

By 2000 I had dropped to causing only 3,500 cases - a 99% decrease from the 350,000 cases in 1988.

Millions of children are being immunised against me in third world countries.

I caused a scare in Indonesia in 2005, until they got themselves organised. They think they have got me.

But I am hanging in there.

You’ll still find me around - somewhere!

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