Bill Gates Reviews Polio: An American Story
“We sometimes take for granted the speed of scientific breakthroughs today,” writes Bill Gates in his review of Polio: An American Story. “Yet, Oshinky’s book reminded me of the painstaking efforts scientists often must undertake. Forty years after the polio virus was discovered, scientists still didn’t know what caused it.”
It was in 1921 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio, as it was diagnosed at the time, the disease being epidemic. (A more recent study suggests Roosevelt’s case may have been Guillain-Barré syndrome.) Within two days, he was paralyzed in both legs. He would spend the rest of his life disabled–as President, FDR was the co-founder of the March of Dimes–and die in 1945 with polio about to break new records: 1952 saw 57,000 cases in the U.S.
When I write about vaccines today, I often hear first from vaccine denialists, people who are under the impression that vaccination is more dangerous than the disease (either because the disease isn’t that bad, treated homeopathically, or because, they argue, vaccines are much more dangerous than we’re told). A subset also argue against vaccines that aren’t 100 percent effective.
The history of polio in the U.S. in particularly instructive then. In his review, Gates spends little time on the psychological impact, focusing on polio’s brutal, life-long after-effects: “For decades, no one knew why thousands of children would suddenly be stricken–usually in midsummer–with many dying or left permanently paralyzed.” For more on the emotional scarring, you’ll need to turn to Oshinsky’s book, which Gates says, “captures the mood of a country terrorized by an invisible and little-understood disease.”
In memory, it’s easy to imagine a bright line dividing no-cure from immunization. But as Gates emphasizes, unlocking the key to a vaccine took over half a century. And even then, the Salk vaccine was not 100 percent effective, its work was significant, but also gradual: “In 1956, the number of polio cases in the U.S. dropped by 50 percent compared to the year before, and by another 50 percent the following year.”
What a difference perspective makes in the choice of immunization. Today, polio has been restricted to “1,500 cases in just four countries—India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan,” writes Gates. It’s not an accidental grouping–these four represent the places where polio, for a variety of reasons, is hardest to eradicate.
But neither can it be left alone, points out Gates: “If not completely eliminated, polio will spread back into countries where it has previously been eradicated, killing and paralyzing perhaps hundreds of thousands of children.”
