Polio Panic

As inevitably as warm weather breeds poliomyelitis, polio breeds panic. This year's epidemic, now nearing its peak, is bad--50% greater than last year--and worst since 1934 (latest federal statistics); San Antonio, Denver and Minneapolis have been especially hard hit. But the U.S. Public Health Service has pointed out that the cases (2,596 so far) are scattered, and that the epidemic seems unlikely to take on menacing proportions.

Health authorities, faced with demands to "DO something," have outdone previous efforts to exorcise the disease. Latest efforts: dusting cities with DDT from planes, draining of swamps and pools, street cleanups, etc.

Such antics were dismissed this week by the editor of the American, Journal of Public Health, Professor C.E.A. Winslow of Yale, as no more helpful than beating tom-toms--"reminiscent of the days of yellow fever and the shotgun quarantine of a century ago, when people were driven by blind fear, ignorance and superstition." Added Winslow: "There is no reason to believe that improved methods of sewage treatment and disposal, more rigid standards for the purification of water supplies, or the dusting of DDT over a city . . . will have any measurable effect on the incidence of infantile paralysis."

Best defense: "Stick to the simple and well-established concept that poliomyelitis is principally, if not entirely, spread by direct and intimate personal contact." Biggest polio problem: countless persons, carrying the virus and suffering from unnoticed, subclinical infections, are unaware that they are infected.

The emotional approach to polio was given a further stimulus last week with the arrival from Australia of Sister Elizabeth Kenny. She went dramatically to Minneapolis, where her controversial treatment (hot packs, exercise of affected limbs) was first adopted in the U.S. (in 1940). Objective: to evaluate the work and prove "the ability of Kenny technicians to meet an emergency."

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