60 years in an iron lung: US polio survivor worries about new global threat

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/60-years-iron-lung-us-polio-survivor-worries-about-new-2D11641456

JoNel Aleccia NBC News
Nov. 30, 2013

It’s a long way from central Oklahoma to Syria, but one of America’s last iron lung survivors says she’s a living reminder that an outbreak of polio anywhere in the world is a danger everywhere.

Martha Ann Lillard, now 65, has spent most of the past six decades inside an 800-pound machine that helps her breathe. News this month that at least 13 children have been paralyzed by a resurgence of polio in Syria — where the disease had been eradicated since 1999 — filled her with sadness and dread, she told NBC News. At least four additional cases have been confirmed in the country, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

“If my mother would have had the opportunity to give me the vaccine, she would have done that,” says Lillard, who was a kindergartner in 1953 when she woke up with a sore throat that quickly progressed to something much worse — a life-threatening infection with poliovirus.

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U.S. health experts agree. America’s last outbreak of polio was in 1979, and though risk of reintroduction of the disease is low, they say that growing pockets of unvaccinated children are raising concerns that people may have forgotten the panic over the disease that crippled Lillard — and how easily it could return.

“Scenarios for polio being reintroduced into the U.S. are easy to image and the disease could get a foothold if we don’t maintain high vaccination rates,” says Dr. Greg Wallace, a team leader for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he heads the measles, mumps, rubella and polio epidemiology branch.

“Syria is a good example,” he adds. “They didn’t have any cases. Then they stopped vaccinating for two or three or four years and what do you have?”

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The first known outbreak of polio in the U.S. was in 1894 in Vermont, but it’s the epidemics in the 1950s that scarred the nation. In 1952, a record 57,628 cases of polio were reported in the U.S., and between 13,000 and 20,000 people a year were left paralyzed, records show.

Poliomyelitis is a viral infection of the spinal cord that mainly affects young children. The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water. Most people who are infected develop no symptoms and don’t even know they’ve got it. But in about 1 in 200 cases, the virus destroys the nerve cells that activate muscles, causing irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. It can paralyze breathing muscles, too, sometimes causing death.

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