The View from Mudsock Heights: Remembering When One Flu Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Another, Serious Epidemic

By Dennis E. Powell | May 13, 2009 at 23:39:8

Some of us are old enough to remember it well. I barely remember it, but it was from a dangerous time anyway.

The current concern, being whipped into a panic by the news media, over a strain of influenza, causes one to look back at other epidemics and how they affected us.
When I heard the first reference, a few weeks ago, to “swine flu,” I immediately thought of the great swine flu epidemic scare of 1976. A few soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., had fallen ill with the virus; one died.

Gerald Ford, president at the time, was despite his reputation an intelligent and, yes, agile man. He listened to his advisors and immediately warned of a vast epidemic. The resources of the nation would be put to making a vaccine and administering it widely.

The vaccine makers wanted nothing to do with this. It takes time to develop a safe and effective product to immunize people against a disease. But Congress fell into the frenzy and agreed to indemnify — legally immunize — the vaccine producers. A vaccine was quickly developed and administered, though not widely at first. Good thing.

The swine flu ended up killing just one person, the soldier. But the vaccine killed 39 outright and paralyzed about 500 more.

The epidemic never arrived.

This tells us nothing useful about vaccines, which are good when carefully developed and tested. But it tells us a world about what happens when panics grow and feed off themselves. They are like nuclear reactions, and when critical mass is reached they’re difficult to control and can be disastrous.

The epidemic I just vaguely remember was real and lasted for years. You hardly hear the name anymore, but once it struck terror in the hearts and minds of everyone, especially parents. It was polio. It frightened the nation, indeed the world, for more than half of the 20th century.

I think that my own bit of claustrophobia comes from a televised report that showed a polio victim in an iron lung, a huge barrel in which the patient resided with his or her head sticking out. I remember it vividly, and remember thinking, “what does she do if her nose itches?” Parents and teachers were not above ending some admonition with, “You don’t want to end up in an iron lung, do you?” The fear did border on hysteria. The most famous victim was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The epidemic got worse and worse, for more than 50 years. The “March of Dimes” was formed to provide money for research. In 1952 alone there were almost 60,000 new diagnoses of the disease, which sometimes killed and which almost always paralyzed victims to some degree.

It was a true terror. Swimming pools and movie theatres and roller skating rinks were closed. Playgrounds stood empty.

In 1947, Dr. Jonas Salk began work on a polio vaccine. By 1952, his group of researchers had come up with something they thought would work. They tested it on the residents of a home for retarded children in Pennsylvania. It was a different time with different standards. And it worked.

Three years later, the vaccine was announced and began to be widely administered. I remember my mom getting tears in her eyes when my sister and I were taken for “the polio shot.” For her, the horror was over. Well, that horror, anyway — we still didn’t know when the sky would turn black with Soviet bombers.

A few years later, the Sabin oral polio vaccine was released, and even was administered in schools. There weren’t as many lawyers and whiners in those days.

These things come to mind during the current furor over what may or may not be a terrible epidemic. A degree of skepticism is always healthy, in my estimation, and today it seems as if everything, not just the flu, is a huge and unprecedented emergency requiring an over-the-top response for which we’ll pay for generations. Still, the thing about epidemics is that by the time you know for sure, it may be too late. And the plain old flu kills more than 30,000 people in this country each year.

Thoughts turn, too, to the nature of immunity. Out here in the woods, I don’t spend lots of time in crowds. Maybe that’s a good thing, but I’m not so sure — whenever I am in a big crowd, I catch anything anyone may be carrying, because (I think) I’m not exposed to enough stuff to have developed immunity before it arrived full-blast. This is a guess, but it stands to reason.

The response to the current “pandemic” fears? Far be it from me to give advice, but I plan to keep an eye on the reports, scrape away the 90 percent that is speculative sensationalism, and take such precautions as seem to make sense. Those precautions are matters of hygiene that we ought to employ, anyway. What I don’t intend to do is panic.

Sorry, national media.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.