Polio Scare

In the misshapen ranks of the world's diseases, poliomyelitis is only an infant-sized killer compared with a giant like malaria. As a disabler, it stands well below mental illness. But polio is the disease most feared by U.S. mothers, for it strikes with cruel suddenness, and (though the proportion of older victims is increasing in many parts of the world) its victims are still mostly children.

This looked like a bad year for mothers. Since Jan. 1, there have been 2,881-cases of polio in the U.S. By the same date in 1946 (the year when the U.S. had the largest number of cases in its history), only 2,165 had been reported. Three states reported more than 50 new cases in a single week: North Carolina, 131; California, 92; Texas, 89. Five citizens of Newport News, Va. petitioned Virginia's Governor Tuck to close the border with North Carolina, where total cases in the outbreak had reached 679.

Polio publicity has made polio research dollar-rich, while other less dramatized diseases are dime-poor. In spite of research, however, there is no known way to prevent polio nor to cure it. Addressing the First International Poliomyelitis Conference in Manhattan last week, Dr. Hart E. Van Riper, medical director of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, said: "We may be fighting not one disease, but a whole family of slightly related diseases. We do know already that there are several strains of infantile paralysis capable of producing clinical symptoms, but we do not know how closely related these virus strains are, or, indeed, if they are biologically related at all. We do not know whether special measures of prevention or treatment are necessary for each individual type. Until this problem is solved, there can be no certain prevention or cure."

The delegates voted to extend the fight, set up a permanent World Congress on Poliomyelitis as a scientific clearing house. For mothers there were some reassuring statistics: mortality from polio averages only 1%; the number of children permanently crippled has seldom been more than 1 1/2%, even during the worst epidemics.

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