Today, there is a lot of talk about avian flu. What makes it dangerous is that it can be transmitted from one country to another, not by sick persons, but by infected migratory birds. That is why what begins as an endemic disease in a household can become an epidemic in the community and if unchecked a pandemic throughout the whole world. The beginning of health is to know the disease and up to this date, the average person hardly knows anything about bird flu.
Now, polio, a disease that was totally eliminated in the Western Hemisphere after one of the most successful public health campaigns in history, seems to be making a comeback. A tiny Amish community in Minnesota has reported that an 8-month old girl acquired polio and that it has spread to four other children on two neighboring farms. So far, none of the victims have been crippled and contrary to popular belief only 1 in 200 polio victims end up paralyzed. If anything, the case proves that polio eradication is much harder to achieve even in such highly developed countries like the United States. The polio virus is transmitted from stool to mouth. If polio can stage a comeback in the United States, it could definitely crop back again in third world countries.
Here is what a medical dictionary has to say about polio: "Poliomyelitis, polio, or infantile paralysis, is an acute infection of the central nervous system by a virus. This organism destroys certain nerve cells in the brain stem and the spinal cord, with resultant paralysis of the muscles supplied by those nerve cells.
"Polio is a disease which became more and more common during the first half of the century. By the 1950s, the situation was so bad that, in the United States, Scandinavia and Great Britain, the ‘polio season’ had come to be dreaded by every parent. Every year, literally thousands of children (and adults too) were paralyzed or even killed by the disease.
"The clinical picture was fairly constant. In the pre-paralytic stage, the patient simply felt ill and had a slight fever. Two or three days later, he developed a headache, together with pain and tenderness in the legs and back. Some patients then got better, but others went on to the paralytic stage, when this happened, all movement was lost in a particular group of muscles – often most of those of one limb. Sometimes however, the paralysis would affect more than one limb, or perhaps the muscles of respiration. This was one of the most serious complications of polio, since once it happened the patient could only breathe with external aid. Also of grave significance was paralysis of the muscles of the throat and voicebox (larynx)."
An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.