How Polio Spreads

If every child with bad teeth had them fixed, there would be a lot more work for dentists and there might be a lot less infantile paralysis. So said Baltimore's Dentist Myron S. Aisenberg and Bacteriologist Thomas C. Grubb.

In the Journal of the American Dental Association they told of putting a little virus in the tooth cavities of monkeys. They succeeded in producing paralysis in one monkey and nerve damage in several others. From two areas in last year's polio epidemic they got additional evidence: 70% of the victims in three North Carolina treatment centers had such bad cavities that pulp was exposed, while only 27% of well children in the same districts had serious cavities; in Baltimore 65% of polio patients had exposed pulp, compared with only 24% of well children.

Findings of other recent delvings into the still unsolved mystery of how polio spreads:

P: Flies in the home of a polio victim may infect exposed food. In Science, Yale researchers reported finding polio virus in the stools of two laboratory chimpanzees after the apes were fed sliced bananas which had been exposed in the homes of North Carolina polio victims.

P: Polio is usually transmitted by personal contact, asserted Birmingham's Dr. Albert Casey in the American Journal of Diseases of Children. After tracing the sources of So cases in rural Alabama, he concluded that in that locality 1) the disease spread radially from the initial case, enlarging its circle at a rate of about a mile every ten days; 2) no outside agents such as rodents, food or insects seemed to be involved.

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