Postpolio

[lemit]

Lemit, this link may be helpful: Preventing complications in polio survivors

 

Good luck with your surgery.

 

Thanks. I forgot to mention Dr. Richard Bruno(Richard Louis Bruno - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It seems that everything he has written is perfectly on-target and extremely useful. I printed a couple of his articles and gave them to my doctor, who was very grateful, and who immediately started using them in planning treatment strategies. I think that says a lot.

 

My goal in this thread is to educate both myself and other people. All of you who can't read my mind, please feel free to provide references. Those of you who can read my mind already knew about Dr. Bruno (and oher things I hope you won't mention publicly).

 

--lemit

Edited August 9, 2010 by lemit

[mynah]

I never knew there were so many hidden and unusual risks to polio survivors undergoing surgery. As vaccines have been available for about 50 years, the danger exists that more and more young doctors may come to regard polio as a disease of the distant past, without realising that patients with polio-related weakness or paralysis may need to be treated differently compared to patients with similar-looking problems of different origin.

[lemit]

Unfortunately, poliomyelitis is still a threat to world health. The Wikipedia page on it explains that it is an easily transmitted enterovirus, and around 90% of those infected are asymptomatic. In other words, as was the case with me, babies could be put together to play and slobber on each other with no realization until much later that something had gone wrong.

 

The disease is still active in unstable parts of the world. If we do not continue to immunize as if it were everywhere in the world, it will be everywhere in the world soon enough.

 

Another problem, as I've mentioned here before and as is again applicable to my case, the less symptomatic infants are with poliomyelitis, the more symptomatic middle-aged adults are with post-polio.

 

For those of you who'd like to read more, the following brief, inadequate online resource list is only a start, but it is after all what Hypography is supposed to be about.

 

General:

Poliomyelitis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Post-polio syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What is Post Polio

Post-Polio Syndrome Glossary of Terms with Definitions on MedicineNet.com

https://health.google.com/health/ref/Poliomyelitis

Post Polio Syndrome

 

Post-polio and Surgery:

PPS & Surgery by Richard L. Bruno, Ph.D.

http://www.gbppa.org/surgery.html

 

Bibliographies:

Post-Polio Syndrome, Recently Published Medical Articles

 

Organizations:

Welcome to PHI's official website

IPPSO - International Post Polio Support Organization

http://www.postpolio.org/

 

This is obviously just stuff off the top of my head. I’ll do some research and ask my post-polio therapist for more sources, and I'll update this list from time to time. I’d appreciate help from any interested Hypographers out there.

 

Thanks.

 

--lemit

[mynah]

I meant to add "in first world countries", although admittedly the situation is more complex than that.

 

I was wondering - if asymptomatic polio could cause PPS, could vaccination not do the same? If so, would the type of vaccination make a difference? (In South Africa, for instance, we received Sabin live virus vaccine when I was a child, while children in the US were vaccinated with Salk killed virus vaccine. I believe a combination is now used.)

[lemit]

I meant to add "in first world countries", although admittedly the situation is more complex than that.

 

I was wondering - if asymptomatic polio could cause PPS, could vaccination not do the same? If so, would the type of vaccination make a difference? (In South Africa, for instance, we received Sabin live virus vaccine when I was a child, while children in the US were vaccinated with Salk killed virus vaccine. I believe a combination is now used.)

 

If I remember this documentary (WGBH American Experience . The Polio Crusade | PBS) correctly, the development of the Salk vaccine was pushed forward in spite of concerns about its safety. We all became subjects in a national experiment. I remember the palpable sense of hope when Salk's vaccine was announced. Finally we could have our summers back.

 

When I was four years old, in September, 1950--the worst year of the polio epidemic--I fell off a horse I was riding on my aunt and uncle's farm just northwest of Des Moines, Iowa, breaking my arm just above the elbow. I was taken to Iowa Lutheran Hospital, where all the attending physicians were at a football game and a very raw resident set my arm incorrectly. My arm had to be re-broken and re-set. I was in Iowa Lutheran three weeks. My father and brothers went back to our farm just across the border in Missouri, while my mother stayed with relatives about a mile across the Des Moines River from the hospital. Every day she walked to the hospital and was allowed to visit me for an hour at the six-bed pediatric room where I remained in traction the whole of my stay. But she was not allowed to enter the room. She could stand in the doorway, some 20 feet from my bed, and we could shout at each other over the afternoon hospital noise. But we could not touch. I had always been very close to my mother, and was in agony at that forced separation.

 

That separation is how people responded to the fear polio created in 1950. It killed. It crippled for life. Nobody knew exactly how it was transmitted and when or where it might strike. Polio was a pervasive threat in a world that was thought to have been saved by winning World War II. By 1955, when the Salk vaccine became available, we were all so buoyed by a collective sense of hope and relief that we happily ignored the risks and lined up for our shots.

 

--lemit

Edited August 10, 2010 by lemit