Continuing Battle

The nation's infantile paralysis experts gathered last week at Warm Springs, Ga. to observe the 20th anniversary of the full-scale U.S. war against polio which Franklin Roosevelt launched in 1927. The experts were shown a grim parade of 84 patients with grotesquely twisted spines and limbs--eloquent evidence that in spite of two decades of earnest slugging by medical science, the war against polio is still an uphill struggle.*

The conferees, summing up recent improvements in treatment, found hope in the fact that about 70% of infantile paralysis patients recover without serious permanent damage. The score to date:

P: How polio is spread is still the No. 1 puzzle. Because the polio virus is found in large amounts in the digestive tract, investigators now think that its chief invasion route is the mouth, probably in contaminated food. Flies are known to carry the virus. But dusting cities with DDT does not seem to stop epidemics.

P: Infantile paralysis is often confused with other nervous-system disorders (e.g., various forms of meningitis). Researchers now suspect that a 1934 "polio" epidemic of 2,055 cases in Los Angeles was incorrectly diagnosed, and a supposed polio outbreak in Delaware this summer, which had almost no crippling effects, may not have been polio.

P: Polio specialists have learned that psychotherapy is as important as physical care: toughest hazard in polio treatment is the patient's panicky fear of the disease.

* The U.S. had a breathing spell from polio this year, but epidemics hit hard in Britain, Germany, Belgium, Sweden.

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