I am Poliomyelits virus, and I have inhabited this planet for many years than I care to remember. I was there with the ancient Egyptians long before Menes united the two kingdoms of Lower and Upper Egypt in 3100BC. In fact the finding of misshapen bones of some mummies show I was already celebrating my sixth hundred birthday before his unification party. You know I followed the Badarian south to Abydos in Upper Egypt, helping them with their copper smelting, even supervising them building their houses of mud brick and thatch.
But enough of that, suffice to say I must have liked the sunsets over the Nile because I was still there if you look at the stone reliefs of 1500 BC, those poor priests with their atrophied short legs, their muscle wasting, their crippled bone growth. Just look a little closer at the artefacts on show the next time you are down near that old sandy museum in Maydan El Tahrir, Cairo and you will probably see my calling cards. Anyway, having enough of the Akhenatens and the Amarnas, I decided I needed a Greek holiday and arrived on the island of Kos. It was just about the beginning of the fourth century, the time Ictinus was designing the Parthenon and Pericles was still trying to find which Irish bar was serving the best tequila slammers over on Ios.
Well, who did I run into but the great Hippocrates himself and he even mentioned me under the title of 'infant paralysis' in his latest book 'The Hippocratic Corpus' . OK! It wasn't exactly a best seller, but with Plato, Philolaus and that newcomer Lysis of Epaminondas all trying to make the Christmas list, well he had some stiff opposition, you know. By the way, my name is Greek, pilios (gray), myel (marrow) and itis (inflammation). Well, it's not really as bad as it sounds, after all it could have been worse. Can you imagine telling some poor Irish women, her teenage daughter has just befriended Spiro.
And as the Roman Empire fell, and unwashed barbarians descended upon their cities, looting artefacts and burning books, I went with the Irish who took up the great labour of copying all of Western literature 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 and unwittingly transformed me into a paralysing agent of epidemic proportions. The improvements in waste disposal and the widespread use of indoor plumbing during the late nineteenth century meant that babies were no longer exposed to me at a young age and acquired no natural immunity.
God bless the Huns, maybe they had some use after all!. When I visited the Scottish poet, Sir Walter Scott at the tender age of eighteen months, his doctors thought he had 'teething fever'. His grandfather, Dr. Rutherford even suggested that they should take the boy out into the country where the clean air would be good for his lame leg. I visited Stuttgart in 1840 and even got mentioned in a book by the renowned physician of the day, Dr. Jacob von Heine. They later even called me the virus Brunhild meaning of course 'fighter in armour' but really being named after an Icelandic queen from the epic Nibelungenlied
Wasn't my cup of tea.
Anyway, back to my tale. In 1916, I crossed the Atlantic and while poor Padraig Pearse was busy battling it out in the General Post Office, I checked out the new flushing toilets in New York. That summer I befriended thousands of young children in the city and panic erupted as thousands of families fled from Manhattan. Talk about bioterrorism at its best, the Department of Health quarantined the city and hundreds of families were turned back on Brooklyn Bridge. By the end of the summer two thousand Manhattan children were dead and I had paralysed nine thousand others.
By the time of the Great Depression, I was the most feared disease known on the planet and everywhere there was sanitation there were people hobbling around on crutches, rolling about in wheelchairs, lying immobile in giant iron lungs, the legions of sufferers, none knowing what was causing their affliction. Things got so bad that President Franklin Roosevelt actually declared a war on me and put the tremendous resources of post-war America were brought to bear in trying to develop a vaccine against me.
However, the 1930's were years of great poverty and medical advances were often rushed in an effort to stop my advances. In 1935 field trials for a new vaccine were tried by Maurice Brodie and John Kollmer. Brodie concocted his vaccine from an emulsion of the ground-up spinal cords of infected monkeys. He even attempted to deactivate me by exposing me to formalin and then he tried the concoction on twenty monkeys and 3000 children. The less said about this the better as in the words of a historian of the period, "something went terribly wrong and his concoction was never used again".
Kollmer then tried mixing me with various chemicals and putting me in a fridge for two weeks. The new 'attenuated' virus, he called me. Well he tried out this veritable 'witches brew' on a few monkeys, himself, his children, and twenty-two others. He even started to distribute it to hundreds of physicians across the country but after he was blamed for causing many cases of polio, some even fatal, he gave up the quest. Kolmer addressed a meeting of the Southern Branch of the American Public Health Association in 1935, with the words "Gentlemen, this is one time I wish the floor would open up and swallow me." To be fair, he did manage to pick up the pieces and go on to a successful, if not distinguished, research career.
But poor old Brodie, he died shortly afterwards but not before accepting a minor research position in Michigan. It is rumoured in many circles that he took his own life, but either way he was not around to see Jonas Salk having a little more success with the problem. True, he 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, but like an American bomber with a Taliban in his sights, he knew that he had me on my back. In 1952 he inoculated his wife, and their three sons with his mixture and they all began producing antibodies to the disease, yet no one became ill.
The following year he published the results in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and nationwide testing was carried out. By 1952, I had befriended over 57,628 cases, making it the worst year yet. His former mentor Thomas Francis, Jr., who had helped him develop the influenza vaccine during the Second World War decided that America should start a mass vaccination of their schoolchildren. In 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 or sweetened syrup. The fact it could be taken orally and kept in the refrigerator until administration time meant it was easy to administer in third world countries such as Africa. After taking the vaccine, you could even excrete live poliovirus from your faeces and immunise all your neighbours secondhandedly. What chance did I have!. God bless the Jews for their ingenuity!
Soon I was only a memory in most of the industrialised world and the economic and social impact was incalculable, except for the makers of crutches, wheelchairs, and iron lungs who quickly went out of business or started work on drones that could be later used in Afghanistan. More recently the World Health Organisation took umbrage against me and said they would smoke me out and run me off the planet by 2005. In 1999, there were 7141 cases worldwide and this had dropped to 3500 in 2000, a 99% decrease from the 350 000 annual cases estimated in 1988. Last year 550 million children under five years were immunised and this included India, where 152 million children were vaccinated in three days. This keeps the campaign on track for a world certified polio-free by 2005
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