I’ll give you a hint, we aren’t talking about cats and dogs…
When is Shedding Season?
So it seems that some folks are really worried about vaccines and shedding.
Precautions against viral shedding? Was he giving out smallpox or oral polio vaccines?
While some vaccines do actually shed, it is really only the oral polio vaccine and the smallpox vaccine that we get concerned about with shedding.
And even then, shedding from the oral polio vaccine would only be a concern for someone with an immune system problem. Since the oral polio vaccine contains an attenuated virus, if that attenuated virus shed to someone else, they wouldn’t get polio except in the very rare situation when the virus mutates. Instead, they would get protection against polio. That’s one of the benefits of using the oral polio vaccine!
Still, we don’t use the oral polio vaccine in the United States anymore.
Although the smallpox vaccine can shed, it is from the site of injection, where a scab forms in the days to weeks after getting vaccinated. Covering the site should prevent other people from getting exposed to shed virus and fortunately, this vaccine is only used in very special situations.
And the rotavirus vaccine sheds, but you just have to wash your hands after changing diapers to avoid this attenuated virus. Are you going to get rotavirus if you are exposed to an infant who was recently vaccinated? Infants who get the vaccine don’t get rotavirus, so why would you if you are exposed to them?
And other vaccines?
While some live vaccines might shed in very specific situations, like if they caused a rare vaccine-induced disease, they otherwise don’t shed. That’s why we don’t worry about most folks with immune system problems getting exposed to people who have recently been vaccinated.
Don’t believe me?
Every time there is an outbreak of measles, someone insists that it was caused by a vaccine strain of measles that was shed from someone who was recently vaccinated. How often is that true?
So when is shedding season?
Anti-vaccine folks consider the start of the school year to be shedding season, because that’s when they think kids get caught up on their vaccines. Is that why we see big outbreaks of measles, chicken pox, and rotavirus at the start of the school year?
Oh wait, we don’t…
“Live vaccine virus shedding is a possible source of transmission of vaccine-strain viral infection but how frequently that occurs is unknown. There is no active surveillance of live virus vaccine shedding and most vaccine strain virus infections likely remain unidentified, untested and unreported.”
NVIC on The Emerging Risks of Live Virus & Virus Vectored Vaccines: Vaccine Strain Virus Infection, Shedding & Transmission
Despite the best efforts of anti-vaccine folks to scare parents about shedding, folks should know that this is no shedding season.
Cases of vaccine strain virus infections from shedding are unidentified and unreported because they don’t happen!
This is why some folks believe in shedding season…
Do you need to teach your kids to fist bump instead of shaking hands during shedding season???
Think about it.
If there were a shedding season, then why wouldn’t there be more outbreaks? Because everyone has learned to fist bump and avoid shaking hands in school?
What to Know About Vaccine Shedding and Shedding Season
Want the real truth? Residual paralysis that lasts more than 60 days is the strongest predictor that a case is really polio, which is why, in addition to testing for polio virus, the 60 day standard is used.
Did Modern Ventilators Replace the Iron Lung for Folks with Polio?
In addition to thinking that we just change the names of diseases when we want them to go away, some folks think that we don’t see anyone in iron lungs anymore, not because polio has been eliminated, but because modern ventilators simply replaced the iron lung.
Is that true?
The iron lung, invented in 1927, helped people with polio breath.
Unlike most of today’s ventilators, the iron lung is a negative pressure ventilator. In contrast, most modern ventilators, the ones that you see people hooked up to with a tube going down to their lungs, are positive pressure ventilators.
What’s the difference?
A positive pressure ventilator pushes air into your lungs. They are useful when you have a lung disease or simply can’t breath on your own.
When people had polio, there usually wasn’t anything wrong with their lungs – it was their chest muscles and diaphragm that were the problem. So the negative pressure in the iron lung would compress and decompress their chest.
One benefit of the iron lung included that it was less invasive than ventilating someone through a tracheostomy, which became an option in the 1960s. While many new options became available for those needing long term ventilation since then, including noninvasive positive pressure ventilation, some still like to use their iron lungs.
Thanks to vaccines, most folks will only see an iron lung in a museum and read about polio in history books. Photo by Oscar Tarragó, M.D., M.P.H.
And while it is true that they don’t make them anymore, iron lungs have not disappeared. There are some folks with polio that still use them.
But what if someone developed polio now, would they be put in an iron lung?
No, they wouldn’t. For one thing, they don’t make iron lungs anymore. Instead, they would likely use mouth intermittent positive pressure ventilation.
Still, we don’t see a lot of folks getting diagnosed with polio, needing to use mouth intermittent positive pressure ventilation, instead of iron lungs these days. And that’s because we don’t see a lot of folks getting diagnosed with polio.
What to Know About Polio, Modern Ventilators and Iron Lungs
Although some people with polio are still using their iron lungs, the main reason we don’t see more people with polio needing to use iron lungs or modern ventilators is simply because polio is almost eradicated.
“Before the vaccine was developed, the diagnosis of polio required 24 or more hours of paralysis. After the vaccine release, the diagnosis changed to at least 60 days of paralysis. As you can imagine, cases of polio dropped significantly.”
The Myth That Polio Went Away Because They Changed the Diagnostic Criteria
In 1952, there were 21,000 cases of paralytic polio in the United States.
But were there really?
Didn’t they change the way they diagnosed polio a few years later, right after the first polio vaccines came out, making it less likely that folks would be diagnosed with polio?
The original diagnostic criteria for polio came from the World Health Organization and included:
“Signs and symptoms of nonparalytic poliomyelitis with the addition of partial or complete paralysis of one or more muscle groups, detected on two examinations at least 24 hours apart.”
It changed in 1955 to include residual paralysis 10 to 20 days after onset of illness and again 50 to 70 days after onset.
Why?
“In the past children’s paralysis was often not correctly diagnosed as polio. Stool samples need to be analyzed to be able to distinguish paralytic symptoms from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, transverse myelitis, or traumatic neuritis.”
Polio – Data Quality and Measurement
But you coulld’t just use stool samples, as many kids might have recently had non-paralytic polio, and could test positive for polio (false positive test), but have another reason to have paralysis.
“Isolation of poliovirus is helpful but not necessary to confirm a case of paralytic poliomyelitis, and isolation of poliovirus itself does not confirm diagnosis.”
Alexander et al. on Vaccine Policy Changes and Epidemiology of Poliomyelitis in the United States
Since polio causes residual paralysis, the new diagnostic criteria helped to make sure that kids were diagnosed correctly.
Did We Overestimate the Number of Kids with Polio?
Some folks think that since we changed the criteria, we overestimated the number of kids with polio in the years before the vaccine came out.
Most of this idea seems to come from a panel discussion in 1960 by critics of the original polio vaccine, The Present Status of Polio Vaccines, including two, Dr. Herald R. Cox and Dr. Herman Kleinman, who were working on a competing live-virus vaccine.
None in the group were arguing against vaccines, or even really, that the Salk polio vaccine didn’t work at all though. They just didn’t think that it was effective as some folks thought.
“I’ve talked long enough. The only other thing I can say is that the live poliovirus vaccine is coming. It takes time. The one thing I am sure of in this life is that the truth always wins out.”
Dr. Herald R. Cox on The Present Status of Polio Vaccines
Dr. Cox did talk a lot about the oral polio vaccine. He talked about successful trials in Minneapolis, Nicaragua, Finland, West Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Japan, and Costa Rica, etc.
When anti-vaccine folks cherry pick quotes from The Present Status of Polio Vaccines discussion panel, they seem to leave out all of the stuff about how well the oral polio vaccine works.
“Since nothing is available, there seems to be no alternative but to push the use of it. I don’t think we should do so in ignorance, nor too complacently, believing that as long as we have something partially effective there is no need to have something better.”
Dr. Bernard Greenberg on The Present Status of Polio Vaccines
And of course, they did, fairly soon, switch to something better – the Sabin live-virus oral polio vaccine.
Interestingly, using the idea that we changed the diagnostic criteria to make polio go away in an argument about vaccines is known as the Greenberg Gambit.
It tells you something about anti-vaccine arguments, that these folks are misinterpreting something someone said about vaccines almost 60 years ago.
In pushing the idea that polio hasn’t been eliminated, but rather just redefined, they also miss that:
But isn’t polio still around and just renamed as transverse myelitis, Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), and aseptic meningitis?
Let’s do the math.
Using the adjusted numbers in the The Present Status of Polio Vaccines discussion, there were at about 6,000 cases of paralytic polio in the United States in 1959.
While 3,000 to 6,000 people in the United States develop Guillain-Barré syndrome each year, the risk increases with age, and it is rare in young kids. Remember, paralytic polio mostly affected younger children, typically those under age 5 years.
“Transverse myelitis can affect people of any age, gender, or race. It does not appear to be genetic or run in families. A peak in incidence rates (the number of new cases per year) appears to occur between 10 and 19 years and 30 and 39 years.”
Transverse Myelitis Fact Sheet
Similarly, transverse myelitis is uncommon in younger children, and there are even fewer cases, about 1,400 a year.
What about aseptic meningitis? That doesn’t usually cause paralysis.
So do the math.
You aren’t going to find that many kids (remember, the incidence was 5-7 per 1,000) under age 5 years who really have “polio,” but instead, because of a worldwide conspiracy about vaccines, are getting diagnosed with transverse myelitis, Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), or aseptic meningitis instead.
Anyway, kids with acute flaccid paralysis are thoroughly tested to make sure they don’t have polio. And both transverse myelitis and Guillain-Barré syndrome have different signs and symptoms from paralytic polio. Unlike polio, which as asymmetric muscle atrophy, the atrophy in transverse myelitis and Guillain-Barré syndrome is symmetrical. Also, unlike those other conditions that cause AFP, with polio, nerve conduction velocity tests and electromyography testing will be abnormal. Plus, polio typically starts with a fever. The other conditions don’t. So while these conditions might all be included in a differential diagnosis for someone with AFP, they are not usually that hard to distinguish.
“Each case of AFP should be followed by a diagnosis to find its cause. Within 14 days of the onset of AFP two stool samples should be collected 24 to 48 hours apart and need to be sent to a GPEI accredited laboratory to be tested for the poliovirus.”
Polio – Data Quality and Measurement
But why be so strict on following up on every case of AFP?
It’s very simple.
If you miss a case of polio, then it could lead to many more cases of polio. And that would tmake it very hard to eradicate polio in an area.
If anything, until the establishment of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in 1988, it is thought that cases of polio and paralytic polio were greatly underestimated in many parts of the world!
And now polio is almost eradicated.
“DR. SABIN: Let us agree, at least, that things are not being brushed aside. Let us say that we might disagree on the extent to which certain things have received study. But I hope that Dr. Bodian realizes that nobody is brushing things aside. I would not have taken the trouble of spending several months studying viremia with different strains in chimpanzees and human volunteers, and viremia produced by certain low temperature mutants to correlate it with their invasive capacity, if I were merely brushing it aside.”
Live Polio Vaccines – Papers Presented and Discussions Held at the First International Conference on Live Poliovirus Vaccines
If they redefined how paralytic polio was diagnosed in 1955 as part of a conspiracy to make it look like the polio vaccines were working, then why did the number of cases continue to drop into the 1960s?
Shouldn’t they have just dropped in 1955 and then stayed at the same lower level?
After the switch to the Sabin vaccine, polio was on its way to being eliminated in the United States, although there was an uptick in 1959, before we made the switch.
And why don’t any of the folks with other conditions that cause paralysis, like transverse myelitis and Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) ever have polio virus in their system when they are tested?
Also, if the renaming theory explains why the polio vaccine didn’t work, then why do anti-vaccine folks also need to push misinformation about DDT and polio?
What to Know About Polio Myths and Conspiracies
The near eradication of polio from the world is one of the big success stories of the modern era, just as those who push the idea that has all been faked is a snapshot of society at one of our low points.
Breaking News – further tests have found that the person with suspected polio did not have either wild polio or vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV). Could it still be polio? (see below).
Polio is on the verge of being eradicated.
In 2017, there have only been 118 cases of polio in the whole world, including 22 cases of wild poliovirus in Afghanistan and Pakistan and 96 cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Syria.
So far this year, there have only been 15 cases of polio in the whole world, including 10 cases of wild poliovirus in Afghanistan and Pakistan and five cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria.
Is Polio Returning to Venezuela?
Most of us are aware that vaccine-preventable diseases are just a plane ride away.
We see it, or at least read about it, all of the time, as we continue to see outbreaks of measles affecting our communities.
But polio?
Could polio return?
Venezuela has been polio free for nearly 30 years. The last case of a wild poliovirus infection was in March 1989. And yet ,there are now thought to be at least four cases of poliovirus, type 3 in the Delta Amacuro state of north east Venezuela, where they are also seeing cases of diphtheria and measles.
Among the polio cases is a 2-year-old boy who was unvaccinated, an unvaccinated child who lived next to him, and a partially vaccinated child 8-year-old who lived next door.
“It has been reported unofficially that it is polio vaccine virus.”
Venezuelan Society of Public Health Report
But what is the source of the polio vaccine virus?
We supposedly stopped using oral polio vaccines that can shed in January 2016, right?
Actually, we began the switch from trivalent OPV (tOPV) to bivalent OPV (bOPV) in 2016, removing the the type 2 polio virus that is most likely to cause VAPP. Making sure kids get a dose of IPV first also lowers the risk of VAPP. At least it does when kids get vaccinated according to plan.
“Other children from the same community were vaccinated in April 2018 with oral bivalent polio vaccine.”
PAHO on Epidemiological Update Detection of Sabin type 3 vaccine poliovirus in a case of Acute Flaccid Paralysis
When did the first case appear? Although we are just hearing about it now, his symptoms began in April, right around the time another child received a bivalent oral polio vaccine.
“No additional AFP cases have been identified to date through active search for AFP cases carried out in the community.”
PAHO on Epidemiological Update Detection of Sabin type 3 vaccine poliovirus in a case of Acute Flaccid Paralysis
Fortunately, in the past month, no further cases have been identified.
Children in Venezuela are supposed to get at least one dose of IPV (inactivated polio vaccine), followed by four doses of bOPV (bivalent oral polio vaccine).
So what does this all mean?
For one thing, wild polio isn’t returning to Venezuela. And it doesn’t look like we will see a large outbreak of cVDPV, as there are no further cases of AFP in the area.
But it does illustrate that we can easily see a return of vaccine-preventable disease if we don’t keep vaccinating until they are eradicated. Remember, low vaccination coverage is associated with outbreaks of cVDPV. If everyone is vaccinated and protected, then they won’t get polio, whether it is wild type or shed from someone who was vaccinated.
Latest Updates on AFP in Venezuela
While a Sabin type 3 polio virus had been initially isolated from the stool samples of the unvaccinated 34-month-old boy with polio symptoms, further tests have now been completed.
“Tests carried out by the specialized global laboratory for genetic sequencing have ruled out the presence of both wild poliovirus and vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV). The latter- VDPV- is a Sabin virus with genetic mutations that give it the ability to produce the disease. There is no risk of spread to the community or outbreaks of polio from this case.”
PAHO
So what does he have?
The possibilities are non-polio AFP, as many viruses and other diseases can cause polio-like symptoms.
So why did he have the Sabin type 3 polio virus in his stool?
It is well known that the oral polio vaccines shed. Even though he was unvaccinated, he was likely exposed to others in the community who were recently vaccinated, as it is possible to shed the vaccine virus in your stool. The attenuated (weakened) vaccine virus is unlikely to cause symptoms though, unless it develops the mutations found in VDPV strains, which this one didn’t.
“The child is being further evaluated clinically to determine alternative causes of paralysis. The final classification of the case of acute flaccid paralysis [to define whether or not it is associated with the vaccine] will be based on clinical and virological criteria assessed at 60 days after the onset of paralysis.”
PAHO
So despite what folks are reporting, they didn’t say that this case couldn’t be associated with the polio vaccine. We just know that it is isn’t wild polio and the virus doesn’t have the mutations associated with cVDPV strains, which can not only cause polio symptoms, but can also spread from one person to another, causing outbreaks.
Remember, although the attenuated vaccine virus in the oral polio vaccine is unlikely to cause polio symptoms, it sometimes can, in about 1 in 2.7 million doses.
“VAPP at this time can’t be ruled out, of course, as it’s one of the possibilities.”
Communications Officer
Global Polio Eradication Initiative
Could this child have VAPP?
“A VAPP case was most often defined as a case of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) with residual paralysis (compatible with paralytic poliomyelitis) lasting at least 60 days, and occurring in an OPV recipient between 4 and 40 days after the dose of OPV was administered, or in a person who has had known contact with a vaccine recipient between 7 and 60–75 days after the dose of OPV was administered.”
Platt et al on Vaccine-Associated Paralytic Poliomyelitis: A Review of the Epidemiology and Estimation of the Global Burden
I guess we will find out in a few weeks, as his symptoms started at the end of April.
Still, remember that VAPP is not contagious.
What to Know About Polio Returning to Venezuela
Several cases of a vaccine strain of polio virus have been found in Venezuela, which is linked to low vaccinated levels.
Polio is caused by one of three wild-type polio viruses.
Of course, anti-vaccine folks like to push misinformation about polio being caused by a lot of other things, from poor hygiene and eating too much white bread to having a tonsillectomy or being exposed to pesticides, like DDT.
“Williams describes the many blind alleys and false leads of the early days of polio research, when doctors, scientists, and public health officials were convinced that the disease was transmitted by bedbugs, budgies, cats, and flies, or caused by seafood, cow’s milk, jimson weed, fruit, vegetables, and DDT…”
If the polio virus doesn’t cause polio (germ theory denialism), then you can’t really expect the polio vaccine to prevent polio, now can you?
The DDT-Polio Connection?
There actually is a bit of a connection between polio and DDT, but not the one anti-vax folks think.
Wait, what?
No, DDT didn’t cause polio.
“Between the end of World War II and the early 1950s, researchers, municipal officials, and individuals from Georgia to California employed DDT to stop polio by killing flies, a suspected but debated actor in the disease’s transmission.”
Conis on Polio, DDT, and Disease Risk in the United States after World War II
Yes, many towns would routinely spray with DDT after a polio epidemic came to town because they didn’t yet know what did cause polio.
For example, in May 1946, “sections of the city were blanketed” with DDT as they sought to stop the source of a polio epidemic in San Antonio, which they thought might be a “tropical mosquito.”
Even the schools were closed in San Antonio when polio came to Texas in 1946. And they stayed closed for the last few weeks of the Spring term!
See the connection now?
Polio first. DDT spraying after.
This idea is especially easy to see when you understand that there were many polio outbreaks and epidemics in the late 19th and early 20th century, well before DDT was discovered to be an effective insecticide in the early 1940s.
And the spraying mostly stopped before the polio outbreaks stopped.
In 1951, although he wasn’t yet sure how the polio virus spread, Dr. Sabin did know it came from “human feces derived from patients and healthy carriers,” and he declared that there was “general agreement that there is no justification for initiating emergency insect control measures in the hope of stopping a poliomyelitis epidemic.”
“It is perhaps an established epidemiological principle that epidemiological probability must be compatible with bacteriologic (or virologic) possibility, particularly when the epidemiological probabilities lend themselves to several alternative explanations.”
Albert B Sabin, MD on Transmission of Poliomyelitis Virus
And even before that, the Editorial Board for the American Journal of Public Health, in 1946, said that “While municipal cleanliness and sanitation are always highly desirable, there is no reason to believe that improved methods of sewage treatment and disposal, more rigid standards for the purification of water supplies, or the dusting of DDT over a city from aeroplanes will have any measurable effect on the incidence of infantile paralysis.”
Also remember the other big reason that we saw DDT spraying in the United States – the elimination of malaria.
“The National Malaria Eradication Program, a cooperative undertaking by state and local health agencies of 13 southeastern states and the CDC, originally proposed by Louis Laval Williams, commenced operations on July 1, 1947. By the end of 1949, over 4,650,000 housespray applications had been made.”
CDC on Elimination of Malaria in the United States (1947 — 1951)
Did the spraying of DDT to eliminate the flies that transmit malaria in the southeastern United States correlate with extra cases of polio?
No.
There were big outbreaks in New York, Indiana, Ohio, and many other parts of the country that didn’t spray DDT to help fight malaria.
“The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton.”
EPA on DDT Ban Takes Effect
Did we stop spraying with DDT in the early 1950s because it was banned and is that why we stopped seeing so much polio?
No.
The peak year for DDT use was in 1959. Surprisingly, we don’t see that peak on any anti-vaccine graphs in 1959…
What was the peak year for polio cases? It wasn’t 1959 or 1960, as you would expect if there was a link between DDT and polio.
Although the use of DDT decreased after 1959, it was used until it was “banned” in 1972, and even then, there were exceptions for public health uses.
Explaining Polio
The polio virus causes polio.
But why?
Or at least why did we start seeing so many more cases in the late 18th through the mid 19th century, until it was controlled with our polio vaccines?
“…contrary to the prevailing “disease of development” hypothesis, our analyses demonstrate that polio’s historical expansion was straightforwardly explained by demographic trends rather than improvements in sanitation and hygiene…”
Martinez-Baker et all on Unraveling the Transmission Ecology of Polio
One rather simple and elegant explanation is that we started to get too clean, the “disease of development” hypothesis.
Improved hygiene and sanitation helped delay when kids would get polio. Remember, polio is spread by contaminated food and water through fecal-oral transmission.
So instead of routinely getting it when they were newborn babies or young infants, when they still had some protection from maternal antibodies, they got it later when they had no immunity. So polio essentially changed from an endemic disease, or something that everything got, to an epidemic form.
DDT is a pesticide that was widely used after World War II and was sometimes sprayed in a vain attempt to keep polio outbreaks from getting out of control. That is the only connection to polio though.
At least it is well known by the people who understand that vaccines are safe, vaccines are necessary, and that vaccines work.
If you are on the fence or hesitant to vaccinate your kids, you might not be so sure and might not know who to trust when it comes to getting information about vaccines.
That’s why it is important to get educated, be skeptical, and do your own research.
How Quickly Can You Debunk Anti-Vaccine Propaganda?
What do you think about the following photo description that is making the rounds on anti-vaccine websites and on Facebook?
How quickly could you figure out if the information is true or not?
Is this a photo of kids in iron lungs because of the Cutter Incident?
Of course, the Cutter Incident is actually true and plenty of folks ended up in iron lungs, mostly because of natural polio infections though, not because of the polio vaccine.
“In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died.”
Jason Beaubien on Wiping Out Polio: How The U.S. Snuffed Out A Killer
Let’s start doing some research…
The first clue that this isn’t real is that the cases from the Cutter Incident would have been spread out over the five Western and mid-Western USA states where kids got this particular polio vaccine. With about 200 of them severely affected, they almost certainly would not have had such a large group of people in iron lungs, enough to fill a gymnasium, in just one area.
The next clue is that the iron lungs aren’t plugged in.
That led me to a quick search for ‘iron lung photos’ and an article on Understanding Historical Photos that features the iconic “Iron lungs in gym” photo.
“At first glance, this image shocks and saddens from the enormity of the problem of sick children in need of iron lungs. On closer examination, it is clear that the equipment that usually accompanied people using iron lungs, such as tracheotomy tubes and pumps and tankside tables, is not present (compare the picture to photographs in the section on the iron lung). This scene was staged for a film. It is not historically accurate as a respirator ward, but is an example of an established photographic technique (famously used, for example, by WPA photographers in the 1930s) of directing the viewer’s response by creating a shot that would not naturally occur. ”
Smithsonian National Museum of American History on Understanding Historical Photos
A little more research helped me discover that the photo was taken:
for an informational film that was being produced by the March of Dimes
in the auditorium of the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey, California USA
in 1953
So it took less than a few minutes to figure out that the folks who claim to be “exposing the truth” about vaccines are pushing pure propaganda.
Remember, the Cutter Incident happened in 1955, two years after this photo was taken…
So, a staged 1953 photo for an informational movie for the March of Dimes does not show kids in iron lungs from the Cutter Incident!
How long would you have believed this or other polio myths?
How long would it take you to debunk them?
What to Know About Debunking Anti-Vaccine Propaganda
Learn just how quickly most anti-vaccine misinformation can be debunked if you simply practice being a little skeptical and do your own research.
So far this year, there have only been 11 cases of wild polio in the world – 6 in Afghanistan and 5 in Pakistan.
“In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died.”
Jason Beaubien on Wiping Out Polio: How The U.S. Snuffed Out A Killer
Robin Cavendish was born and raised in the pre-vaccine era though, before we had the polio vaccines that have controlled, and will hopefully soon eradicate, polio.
Who Is Robin Cavendish?
Breathe is the story of Robin and Diana Cavendish.
Robin Francis Cavendish was born on March 12, 1930 in Middleton, Derbyshire, England.
After an early career in the Army, he helped start a tea-brokering business in Africa and made frequent trips to Kenya.
It was in Kenya that he developed paralytic polio in December 1958, just over three years after Jonas Salk‘s polio vaccine was found to be effective in field trials (April 1955).
Although he was initially given just three months to live after his diagnosis, with the help of his wife Diana, he was able to survive for another 36 years!
And they did a lot with those years, including:
using a specially adapted van to travel around England
developing a wheelchair with a built-in respirator with their friend, Oxford professor Teddy Hall and his company Littlemore Scientific Engineering. Their first prototype of their portable respirator was released in 1962 – the Cavendish Chair.
helping scientists develop the Possum, a device that helped severely disabled people electronically control their environment, including answer the phone or turn on the TV
becoming an advocate for other polio survivors
co-founding the charity Refresh with Dr. Geoffrey Spencer, which started as a way for families who needed extra help because of the need for a respirator to go on vacation together
The story of his remarkable life is told in the new movie Breathe.
And while it is also a great reminder of what life was like before we had vaccines, we shouldn’t forget about all of the other polio survivors, some of whom now have to deal with post-polio syndrome.
Nor the fact that we are so close to ending polio. Or at least new polio infections.
What to Know About Robin Cavendish
Robin Cavendish was a respirator dependent polio survivor whose life story is told in the new movie Breathe.
