Pins for Polio

While the U.S. as a whole reported 37% fewer cases in the current polio season than last year (2,295 since April 1, as against 3,613), a swift outbreak hit Chicago and suburbs. Almost every hour of every day last week, workers stuck a pin into a wall map in the office of Chicago's Health Boss Herman N. Bundesen. The red pins stood for new cases of paralytic polio, yellow for nonparalytic, black for fatal cases. By week's end there were 268 pins--166 red, 97 yellow, five black (as against 39 cases, two deaths, at the corresponding date last year).

Two-thirds of all the victims were under six years old--meaning that they had not been among the 110,000 schoolchildren who got free Salk shots in classroom clinics before vacations began. Of the five dead, three were under six, one was 28, one 34. Twenty-two of the victims had been vaccinated against polio, but most had had only one shot of vaccine, instead of the ideal three spread over seven months.

Most unusual feature of the outbreak ("Not an epidemic," insisted Dr. Bundesen) was its distribution. Poliomyelitis is usually most virulent among the well-scrubbed, well-laundered middle and upper classes. But half of Chicago's cases came from a tenement section on the West Side, inhabited largely by Negro and Puerto Rican immigrants. In such families, most children get mild, undetected polio infections in their early years, and such infections give them immunity for life. One guess: the children stricken had been infected before with polio virus of one paralytic strain, while the current outbreak might have been caused by a different strain.

In response to Bundesen's calls, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis shipped in 11,000 hypodermic syringes and needles, and the state supplied another 3,126. The press, radio and TV passed the word: get the children in promptly for free shots. Anxious parents deluged doctors for private shots.

Outside the Board of Health and at three other clinics, working-class mothers lined up with infants in arms and toddlers tugging at their skirts, filed into the emergency inoculation room. There was plenty of vaccine (156,000 shots), and Bundesen bought 50,000 lollipops to ease the needles' stings.

But by week's end Dr. Bundesen was running out of pins for his map.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.