"Walk with Salk"

All over North Carolina's Guilford County mothers called their children in from play one day last week, hustled them into cars and buses and off to the nearest schoolhouse. Three women pulled their total of seven kids from a swimming pool and hauled them off, still dripping, in bathing suits. In High Point an hour-long traffic jam developed around the Ray Street School. Reason for the activity: North Carolina, 47th among the states in fulfillment of polio vaccination goals, was staging a blitz campaign to get out in front. In Guilford County (pop. 209,000) alone, busy physicians donated their time to man 55 clinics.

North Carolina's next-to-last standing (last: Idaho) was possibly deceptive.

Many other states have had difficulty us ing up their allotments of Salk vaccine, and last week 17 states (twelve of them in the South) turned back 2,430,000 shots, largely because schools had closed before adequate supplies became available. In North Carolina the state medical society took the more vigorous step -- it deter mined not to turn the vaccine back, but to put it to work. When the blitz began, only about a third of an estimated 1,935,000 Tarheels eligible for the vaccine (all under 20, and pregnant women) had re ceived it. Guilford County, which had a better-than-average showing to start with (45,000 vaccinated out of 60,000-65,000 eligible), rang up 10,747 hits with the needle last week, about half of them first inoculations, the rest second. There will be a repeat clinic in three weeks to give more second shots.

One problem (not peculiar to North Carolina) has been the dearth of highly susceptible teen-agers at polio clinics or in doctors' private offices. Parents eagerly drag the moppets in by the hand, but ap parently leave teen-agers to fend for themselves. Greensboro's Dr. Samuel Ravenel, who sparked the state drive, tried to remedy this with a slogan: "Walk with Salk, so you can rock 'n' roll." Evi dently it took, because teen-agers made up about half the Guilford queues. In Gibsonville Mrs. Thomas Scoggins took in her five-month-old baby Tim. "How old are you?" the nurse asked. "Nineteen." The nurse took up another needle and gave the surprised mother herself a shot.

Across the U.S. as a whole, polio con tinued to increase in its usual seasonal pattern, but at a far slower rate than usual, giving the lowest total for the disease year (April 1 to date) since 1947. Chicago remained the hot-spot exception, with a new case tallied almost hourly, for a total of 384 at week's end (60% of the victims were children under five), with nine dead. Of 26 victims who had been vaccinated, only two had had three shots; six had two shots, and 18 had had but one.

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