Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Polio
Episode Date: April 29, 2015This week on Sawbones, in the last of their three-part series, Dr. Sydnee and Justin explore the dark and light side of swimming pools as they present the triumph over polio. Music: "Medicines" by The... Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)
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Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion.
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Alright, time is about to books.
One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out.
We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.
Some medicines, some medicines, the escalant macaque for the mouth.
Wow! Hello everybody, welcome to Saw Bones, Madele tour. Missided medicine. I'm your co-host just macaroid
I'm Sydney Macroid said I am getting excited the high today is 70 and it's gonna be in the 80s to the weekend and you know what that means
You're gonna wear those shorts that I love all you gonna see those cute calves
that I love. And I'm gonna see those cute calves.
Can you see those get away sticks?
I love those calves.
I can't get enough of them.
That also means I'm gonna get out to the pool, Sid.
All right, I like that plan.
Then get my goggles on.
I'm gonna throw a change to the bottom pool
and go get it.
I'm gonna work on my base tan.
I'm not gonna let you do that part.
No, I'm not gonna do that part.
But carry on, that's okay.
Well, we'll do other things.
Everything, like all that stuff's in.
I'll, I'm gonna just swim around.
Well, you know, something else you could do.
What's that?
If you had polio, you could do some hydrotherapy
while you're in there.
Okay, well, I mean, that is definitely not
one of the usual things that I think of when
pool time fun is on the menu.
But I'm just trying to think of all the things
you can do in the water, you know, just.
Well, pee, okay, there, there's my, there's my thing.
Do you pee in the pool?
Do you treat your polio in the pool?
Well, I don't have polio.
Okay, well, I don't have pee.
So I guess we're even.
You don't have pee?
What is that?
That's a much bigger problem. Can I tell you something Sydney?
Hold on. Wait, do you not pee because we need to back up and address. Can I tell you something? I don't know what polio is.
Well, that's okay, Justin because I'm gonna tell you all about it. Okay. And then you're gonna know what it is by the end of this
episode. That's the way it works, baby. Okay. And by the way, can I just say do you know why you don't know why what polio is?
Why? Vaccinesio is? Why?
Vaccines.
But we'll get more to that later.
I want to thank a few people who recommended this topic.
First of all, Nicole, Megan, Jennifer, and Jessica, I'll recommend this.
And Emma.
Emma wrote us an email recommending polio.
Emma is 13 and she read a book about it and she thought it would be interesting
for us to talk about.
And she also said Justin that your goofs have helped her make friends.
If you can believe it, your goofs.
So fun, that's so funny that when I was in school, it worked literally the exact 100% opposite
way.
So I'm glad to hear that's working out for you.
Also, I'm so excited to send me a woman
to listen into the program.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm interested in poly.
Getting those STEM fields, ladies.
Get up in there.
So, polio said, what is it?
So polio is a disease that's been around a really long time.
It dates back to antiquity.
And the reason we know that is because we read descriptions
like from the ancient
Egyptians and see hieroglyphs of people, especially children, who have a withered limb or who
are using some sort of like assistive device for walking a cane or a crutch or something
or a description of some sort of infantile paralysis is what it was often kind of referred
to. So we can deduce from that that polio's been around a long time,
but nobody really knew what it was.
You know, we just, somebody would get really sick
and some people may end up paralyzed
and then it didn't happen for a while
and so nobody thought about it
because it was mainly sporadic cases.
Polio's interesting when we really think
about big outbreaks of polio,
the stuff that makes us scared,
why we, even if you don't know much about polio, you kind of know that's something to be scared
of, is really from the 1900s on.
That's when we start seeing the big epidemics that we kind of talk about.
So relatively new in the popular conscience.
Exactly.
It's thought as we look back into history, probably consciousness, probably consciousness, probably
not our conscience. It is thought that the Roman Emperor Claudius had polio. There are some
descriptions of him walking with a withered leg and that he probably survived
polio. And Sir Walter Scott, famously, also had polio in 1773, he lost the use of
one leg. And this, this was a lot of, this inspired a lot of his work and, and his life,
and it was a big turning point for him. It was interesting when Sir Walter Scott got it,
it was referred to as a severe teething fever, which, if you remember from our teething
episode, harkens to the fact that at the time, many childhood illnesses were blamed on
teething.
Right.
This is why we ended up doing weird stuff like cutting gums till the teeth come through.
Exactly.
And it was really just a timing thing.
At the same time, kids were cutting teeth is the same time they happen to be susceptible
to these kinds of diseases.
And so it was thought that he got polio because of his TV.
And again, it was thought many kids who got polio may have been related to teething. I bet that's not even right
No, you do not get polio from teething boom, which is good Charlie's teething right now
It's good no polio there. No, and we didn't sleep much last night on the flip side because I was so worried about polio
But now I don't have to worry about that anymore. I meant because Charlie's teething, but right, okay
Tiny Tim probably had polio.
Well, I mean, okay, no.
You know that that's not like an autobiography, right?
That probably he did.
I mean, we don't know.
I mean, there wasn't.
He lived so long ago.
You can't really tell.
If he had polio or not.
Well, gosh, gosh, you know.
But he probably did.
He didn't, he might have had scurvy.
Like, we have no idea. It doesn't mean he's since. There's no, there's not a historical
account. He didn't have scurvy though. He probably had polio. Okay. Fine. The description
of Dickens' description of Tiny Tim probably in today's medical world, we would say he
had polio. That was probably what he had survived, why he walked with a crutch, and why he was still sick.
clinically pure spirit and
Heart is big all is all outdoors, and that's what's causing his problems. It's a scientific diagnosis that he's just too sweet for this world.
No, I mean no, he probably had polio. Okay. Well, okay, fine.
So like I said, we see these kind of random descriptions of polio throughout history, but then
there weren't big epidemics, not until we get into the
1900s, and this is when we start seeing
multiple cases of what becomes known as polio
popping up throughout Europe in the US and clustered. So not just one one kid who gets sick and and may end up with paralysis,
we see lots of kids in the same area who get sick. So it starts off in the early 1900s with
some clusters of cases in Louisiana. There's some scares in New York, large I mean big population center.
Abolation dense areas, yeah. Boston. But it isn't until the summer of 1916 that we really, polio really declares itself as such
a public health threat.
So up to that point, that was the largest outbreak in the US, and especially in New York City.
There was a huge number of cases and deaths in New York City.
There were over, there were 27,000 cases that summer.
There were 6,000 deaths and 2,000 of those alone were in New York.
Now, when I say, this doesn't sound like like giant numbers when we think about the other
illnesses we've talked about, right?
We talked about the plague, we talked about smallpox.
These numbers are very small compared to the kind of devastation that those illnesses cause.
But you have to consider that it was striking kids. Kids
were largely the people who were affected. So that's going to amp up the scaryness of any
disease. Exactly. And this was a disease that it knew no class boundaries. It didn't matter
how affluent you were. Everybody was susceptible. And they didn't know why.
They knew it came in the summer.
We started to figure that out.
We had more outbreaks in the summer.
But why, what was the cause in the summer?
There was some thought that it was related to water, which was not a bad thought.
But as a result, pools were closed.
Amusement parks were closed down.
Oh, no, not pools.
They answered. They answered a curiopolios, amusement parks were closed down. Oh, no, not pools.
The answer, the answer to cure your polio is right in front of your face. It said, you just stay in the pool, keep swimming.
Well, no, okay, no, hold on.
The one tree doesn't cure polio.
The treatment for polio.
No, wait, no.
You close it.
Okay.
You maniacs.
No.
See, you don't know, no, don't say this thing.
But no, at the time, pools probably were a way of spreading.
No, they certainly were.
I should say probably.
They definitely were a way of spreading polio.
We'll talk a little bit about the polio virus and I'll explain why.
But pools were closed, amusement parks were closed, beaches were closed.
Everybody stayed away from public water fountains with a thought that if it had something to do
with water, let's just stay away from water.
People scattered from New York City, especially that summer of 1916, they just fled to all
the mountains and surrounding areas to just to try to get away, to go hide in their,
you know, I don't know, their log cabins, wherever people go hide from disease.
Yeah.
This has happened a couple times on our show where there are a bunch of people in New York City and then they all flee to other places.
Uh, yeah, it's an odd phenomenon.
You know, that's actually the only reason that people live in New Jersey.
That's true.
New Jersey was founded by people running from polio.
Right.
Running from diseases in New York.
They cross the state line, they're like,
ah, thank goodness.
The polio here.
Do you were making so many people
new to your senior ad right now?
It's a fine, there are much more
ignoble ways for your state to start
than people who were trying to get away from polio.
Like, there's no argument there.
I mean, I think all things being equal,
our state probably had a better origin, just saying. Yeah, I hate it, it's no argument there. I mean, I think all things being equal, our state probably had a better origin, just saying.
Yeah, I hate to slay race that much.
Yeah, so we joined the North,
and we like, we're doing it for Virginia.
But like, that poll,
That's old dominion.
That pollio thing is cool too.
Yeah, that, I'm okay.
Not pollio, it's not, you know what I mean.
Yeah, that's not real,
but it is a fun, we'll go with that.
It's a fun story.
Justin's alternative history.
Yeah.
Okay.
If you had someone in your home that had polio,
your name and address was gonna be published in the paper.
Oh, no.
Yes.
So that you would know who had polio and where they lived
and stay away from them.
Oh, no.
The people were quarantined in their homes
with the, you know,
whoever had polio within their family. And there were signs that were put on the window,
in the windows, like a little sign that you had to put up, that the cardboard placards that
said someone in this home has polio. So, kind of like publishers clearing house, or rather
than bringing you an oversized chat, they're bringing you wood to board up your home, so you're stuck
there. Exactly. And if you and if you took the sign down
or tried to evade the authorities,
they would, I think they were just fine knew,
I don't think they were throwing you in jail,
but they took it very seriously.
Nobody understood how to avoid polio,
so they just kind of locked away anybody who had it.
And this was the norm for decades of summers.
And this is something I don't think we appreciate now
that for it was just accepted that summers coming,
it's, our kids are gonna want to swim in the pool.
But there's this thing that sometimes kids get
and they might get paralyzed and they might die.
So we don't know how to stop it.
We don't know what it's linked to.
Well, that's gotta put a damper on the end of the school year excitement, right?
Hey, Ricky, are you excited about schooling?
Yeah, I'm pretty pumped. I just hope I don't get polio.
You know,
this would be a really, this would be a really good thing.
I like to encourage people to talk to their grandparents because I don't think people
appreciate in our in our our culture the elderly enough. Lesson, yeah, must have been terrifying.
Talk to your grandparents about this. I bet that there are some wild things that I don't
even know about because they're not in books and they're not easily accessible that they
could tell you about living in this time period and what it was like to grow up with this
fear.
Send us your polio stories.
So that was a maximum fun that org.
Let us know, because I bet your grandma and grandpa
have some great stories.
I don't get a second hand from somebody else's grandma
and grandpa, I want that straight from the source ish.
No, go visit them.
Go to your grandma and grandpa's house.
They're happy to hear from you.
They'll probably get your favorite food or soda
or whatever breakfast treat and get it for you and give it to you
And then they'll tell you stories about polio and it will be fascinating. Why not is this diet cheer one? How thoughtful
Did you have some stories about polio you'd like to share?
So let's talk about what polio is because we haven't covered that. Yeah, I'm still kind of wondering
Okay, so I wanted to build the fear of it before I tell you what it is
I'm still kind of wondering. Okay, so I wanted to build the fear of it
before I tell you what it is.
Okay, I'm terrified.
Okay, good, because that's the world,
all these poor people were living in.
They didn't know any of this, this answer yet.
So polio is a virus, it's an inner of virus.
And the reason that I said swimming pools,
avoiding swimming pools was probably a good idea
is that it spread through what we call the fecal oral route,
which yes, that's as gross as it sounds.
Nice.
It's shed through the GI track, meaning that it can come out your butt.
It is something that you could spread from your throat, although that normally wasn't
the way that it spread.
I'm suddenly very stoked that the only public pool in Huntington has now been paved over.
Yes, because public pools were definitely a place where it could spread and it took a
while to incubate, so up to 20 days, so you didn't necessarily know where you got it or
how you got it or who gave it to you when you started having symptoms.
Now the thing most people know about polio, if you know anything, is something about paralysis
and something about an iron lung, but what you don't know is that in 95% of cases, you probably don't know you have it. Really? No. Most of the time polio is not as dangerous
as what we, you know, in popular culture have come to accept. Most of the time your body will
fight it off on its own. You can give it to other people though. Is it one of those where it
continues to lie dormant inside you or are you just clear it?
You're just okay.
Yeah, you just, you got it.
It's over the whole time you were infectious though.
That's one scary thing is that you can,
even if you didn't have symptoms, you could give it
to other people.
In about 4% of cases, you do get some symptoms from polio,
but it's mainly just what we call upper respiratory symptoms, you know, cough, running nose, sore throat, that kind
of thing. You may get some stomach symptoms, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, which of
course was worse for spreading it. And you may even get some flu-like symptoms and
feel kind of lousy, but then it will go away, usually. So we're really getting
down to about one percent of cases when the virus will invade the central
nervous system and that's what we think about when we think about polio. People who actually had
the virus invade their central nervous system and then they can get paralysis of one limb,
several limbs or in the worst case scenario is complete paralysis which often times then would lead to death. And as I said, it's highly, highly infectious.
If one person in your family had polio, it was likely that everyone in that household
was going to get polio.
But I imagine that this started to get better as like we made sanitation better, right?
This is a weird case where as sanitation improved, this is actually probably why we
see the big outbreaks and why as time goes on it from the from the first outbreak in 1916 to the
worst of them in the 1950s, as we move forward, the outbreaks get more deadly because improved sanitation
meant that the age that people were getting polio started getting older.
Now this is interesting about polio. Most cases initially were among infants and they actually
had a lower incidence of causing paralysis in infants. Babies were more likely to get it,
get sick, and then get better. As you get older, if you get polio as you're older, if you're, you know,
five years old, nine years old, 15 years older, greater, you're more likely to get the paralysis
or die from polio. So as we had improved sanitation, babies were exposed to less illnesses.
You know, they just weren't, they weren't as germy. And so they were cleaner. So they
didn't get polio.
You didn't get polio until you were out in the world
exposed to things.
So we see the age of incidence increasing from like six months
to four years old was normal to five to nine years.
And then we see a lot of cases over the age of 15.
And this is where we really start seeing
how deadly polio can be, because it's these older people
who are getting it that have all
of the really devastating consequences.
So Sid, I'm terrified.
How do we fix it?
Fix it.
Fix polio.
Well, I'm going to fix polio for you, but before I do that, I'm going to need you to head
with me to the billing department.
Let's go.
Okay.
So, cure polio.
All right.
So, it's 1952. that I skill it my God for the mouth. Okay, so, cure polio.
All right, so it's 1952 and we're in the worst out break so far in the US.
There are over 57,000 cases, over 3,000 deaths, over 21,000 people are left paralyzed
as the result of this.
Yikes.
And, you know, in general nobody knew what to do. And as I said, as the age of
incident starts increasing, the population becomes less immune because people aren't getting
it as early. So then it becomes more devastating. So basically, this was a situation where we didn't
know what to do. So we tried everything, right? One popular treatment for a while was to apply
electricity to the legs. Kind of a little wake up. Like a little electric pinch.
I like to call that the Dr. Frankenstein treatment.
Come on, legs.
Just wake up.
Wake up.
The more legs.
That's not exactly how nerves work.
Nope.
I like the effort.
I like the thought.
I like the ingenuity, the vim, the vigor.
I'm into it, but it just doesn't work like that.
There were almond meal baths. just take a bath and almond meal sounds I don't know fragrant pleasant.
Relaxing yeah I but that doesn't it doesn't help with polio. There was a there was a
poultice recipe that was very popular it included among other things I had many many ingredients
but some of the best rum and camameal slippery elm and mustard.
Among other things, I have many, many ingredients, but some of the best, Roman, Camamil,
slippery, Elm, and mustard.
Hmm, less, less fragrant.
Less, less fragrant, less, even less helpful.
So I would say.
I would cite more of an olfactory challenge, I would say.
But I do, I always appreciate a good poultice.
Sure, love poultice.
Why not?
Love a poultice.
There were several things that we attempted to do
as like an oral medication to give somebody by mouth.
So take quinine, we'd figured out that it worked from malaria. So
Why not sure it seems to be good
Not no don't do that
caffeine was given I don't know if that was on the basis that hey wake up legs. Yeah
Body doesn't work. I will Java. Yeah, this will wake them up
legs. Yeah. The electricity in the world. Body doesn't work. I will.
I will. Java. Yeah, this will wake them up.
Radiant water, we've talked about this before, radiation, like the idea of some sort of
irradiated compound giving you medical therapy, like that was really popular. So you would
drink this water that usually had like the tiniest, we're talking like, like, homeopathic
doses of a radium in it or was it an irradiated
pot or something? Okay, so this did nothing. Gold was thought to be a treatment.
Which, I mean, if you're just guessing, that seems like a really expensive thing to guess.
Yeah, I would start with like, PyRite and see how that goes. Maybe go up to bronze.
Absolutely. That's the generic that you can buy. Like, the brand name is gold, but then you
get PyRite when it goes generic. That's not true. Most generic drugs are pretty much the
same thing as the brand name. Just, yeah, just don't, don't forget about that. Um, over
the next 40 years, as we, you know, through, from 1916 to the 1950s, when we finally get
to like an actual way to stop polio, um. The one of the most employed treatments was hydrotherapy that I alluded to in the beginning.
We've talked a little bit about hydrotherapy before.
The idea that water intrinsically heals you is basically what hydrotherapy is thought
to be, you know, that if you just get in water or drink water or do it a water in a
ma or in some way interact with water, it will fix whatever is wrong with you.
Well, that's not true, right?
Right.
Like we know that.
But this was at a time where the best that we did for polio patients was to essentially
cast them, cast them as in put them in casts, or brace them until they couldn't move.
What in?
The thought was that because your limbs would become withered, that if you could hold the
limb in the right position, that this, you wouldn't develop like, there are things
contractures as like a limb kind of, it flexes or bends on its own, you know.
And the thought was that if we just strapped you to a board or casted you so you couldn't
move, these things wouldn't happen. And the nerves was that if we just strapped you to a board or casted you so you couldn't move these things wouldn't happen.
And the nerves would fix themselves.
So we this was in a time period where the the common treatment for a polio patient was to strap them to a board essentially for months at a time.
So you just be stuck in your house for eight months, strap to something or cast it in your full body in an attempt to fix things.
or casted in your full body in an attempt to fix things. And all that was happening this entire time is that your muscles were atrophine, both
the muscles that were affected by the polio, and then all the other muscles that maybe
weren't were affected by the casting itself, and then you lost any strength you may have
had.
So, with that in mind, hydrotherapy was actually a pretty decent idea.
It was mainly popularized by FDR.
Oh, sure, yeah, he had polio.
Probably.
There's actually some thought now that maybe he didn't,
that maybe he had Guillain-Barre syndrome.
What?
Yes, but I think that let's go ahead and go
with the idea that maybe he did have polio
because of all he did for polio patients.
Isn't it more of a victim?
Isn't he a greater hero if he didn't have polio?
Then he's just a nut who hated polio.
I said,
No, he really did have.
I'm gonna get you polio over the last thing I do.
He really did have a kid.
I'm not gonna let my guion brace let me down
and get you polio.
FDR, whatever the cause was, really did become paralyzed from the waist down for a period
of time.
The thing is he got better and the way in which he got better, we started to wonder,
did he really have polio or did he have something that was probably going to get better anyway?
We don't know.
It doesn't really matter what he did for polio patients and for the cause of people with
disabilities in this country, I think it's right.
Whatever he had, he popularized hydrotherapy. for polio patients and for the cause of people with disabilities in this country, I think it's right.
Whatever he had, he popularized hydrotherapy.
He went to Warm Springs, Georgia because somebody told him, hey, there are these springs
there.
There are these warm springs.
And they're really great and they'll bring your strength back, so check them out.
So he went down, he swam in these waters, and he thought it was had something to do with
the minerals and stuff that fixed his muscles.
In reality, getting in the water and moving around was probably a great thing to do.
Just to keep exercising your muscles and do something that you didn't have any resistance, so no matter how much strength you'd lost,
you could still participate in. So he opened a polio rehab facility there at Warm Springs, and
it was the imminent, you know, the pre-eminent place to go if you had polio.
And then there were a lot of other places that mimic that.
And this probably was really helpful.
It doesn't cure polio.
It's not the only treatment, but it certainly
is helpful for people.
And it was good if you consider that the other options
at the time were things like surgeries
to lengthen your limbs or electrotherapy,
where we shock you or
vitamin C, which we know doesn't help.
No.
One-
Unless like tiny tin, you actually have scurvy in which case that is going to fix you
right up.
No, tiny tin had polio.
Okay.
Now one thing I should mention is the iron lung because I think a lot of people hear about
it and wonder what it is
Initially an iron lung so it was a way to people with polio as they became became paralyzed loss the ability to
Breathe they lost the muscles that helped them breathe
And so they wouldn't weren't able to breathe
An iron lung was a way to force your chest in and out to make you breathe
So like a ventilator?
Except it was external.
A ventilator now is like a tube that goes down your throat
and breathes for you.
So it's more like it treats you like a big, squeezy toy.
Yes, yes, exactly.
I love you.
It was initially an electric motor hooked up
to two vacuum cleaners.
Cool invention.
And if you can Google pictures of this,
you're laying in a giant metal, it looks like
a coffin with your head sticking out.
There were actually walls of them where they would put several people in the same one.
It almost looks like where you put bodies like the drawers where they put cadavers.
I think they're just jars.
Anyway, with head sticking out.
And they would put several children in one of them.
And you would apply positive pressure to make you breathe out, and negative pressure would
make you breathe in.
And it definitely saved lives for the moment, but overall, the mortality rate was high
because you can't live in one of those.
Right.
But people did for a while.
People lived in iron lungs for quite a while.
And obviously this was later replaced by ventilators, which is a much better way of taking care of this. Or in one outbreak in 1952 in Copenhagen, it was just a bunch
of medical students with anbu bags, the bags that you squeeze the air. Oh gosh.
People's mouths. Instead of iron lungs. I know if you can imagine that.
That sounds exhausting. There was one treatment for polio that we should
mention. It's called the Kinney Regimen.
So, like I mentioned, at the time, the status quo for polio patients was to strap them to boards and cast them until they could move.
Well, there was an Australian nurse, sister Elizabeth Kinney.
Kinne?
No, she was not a nun.
Sister, apparently, or at least was, the British title for a chief nurse, and she was a
chief nurse in World War I.
Okay.
So I don't know if that's still the title they use, but sister Elizabeth Kenny, instead of
casting patients, she thought that was dumb.
She thought it was better to start moving them as early as possible.
So she introduced a regimen of applying heat packs to their atrophy muscles and getting
them up and getting them up
and moving them with physical therapy
and exercise, passive movement, just moving them around
and everything.
And that's still the standard of care today.
I love it.
The kidney regimen.
It challenged all the probably mostly male doctors
at the time who were saying no, no, no, don't do this
and she said, no, I know better, I can figure this out.
Now, Sydney, we've had a lot of fun here today
but we still have polio kicking around.
I know it's not around right now here in America, at least.
Is it around worldwide?
It's still, we'll get to that.
I'm sure I'm rushing you.
How did we make our first like big dent into polio?
So first we had to figure out what was causing it.
And John Enders was able to do that by growing the virus in a culture in the early 1900s or in 1948-ish, something like that. And that was a big
breakthrough because that led us to be able to create a vaccine. You have to have the
virus if you can create a to create a vaccine against it. So the first polio vaccine, Jonas
Sock created it. It's the injection, so it's the vaccine you and I probably
both received, not the one that you take by mouth, the one that you get a shot. And then later,
Albert Sabin created the oral polio vaccine, which I've heard some of, I think that's probably
what our parents got, which is they put it, would put it on a sugar cube. And it was an oral vaccine.
As a result of these vaccines, we see them introduced in like 1950, 354, and then later
the saving vaccine, the cases of polio just drastically start declining.
We see polio disappearing virtually as we start vaccinating the population.
What's fascinating about the SOC vaccine is one, he tested it on himself, he tested it
on his own family. And then he, they basically put it out. It's like a public health triumph.
They put it out to all the parents in the US and said, Hey, wants to volunteer their kid
to get this experimental vaccine. We think it will save them from polio, but we're not
sure. We think it'll work. What do you think? Do you know that over a million parents were willing to sign up?
That's insane.
Can you imagine that today?
I, you know what?
I say no, but like, we haven't had a public health threat like this.
You know what?
I mean, we've had some that are more insidious.
Like, you could make the argument that obesity is like,
is worse in a sense, but it's not that panic
inducing.
I could see definitely people, like you and I, for example, if we were faced with a similar
situation, I think we have enough sort of faith in science that we would, you know.
That's what it is, right?
It's having faith in science.
And I don't know, head to head.
Did people have more faith in science than or no?
I don't know. I know. You're listening. Let's hope we don't know, head to head, did people have more faith in science than or no? I don't know.
I know. Let's hope we don't have to find out.
I know your answer.
Yeah, right.
So they did.
They did these huge trials.
It was a huge success.
The sock vaccine worked well because it didn't.
It was a killed vaccine.
So it couldn't cause polio.
That was a side effect, rarely, of the Saban vaccine, the oral vaccine, it was a live vaccine,
but the oral vaccine was so much easier to distribute that it was really
instrumental in eliminating polio out of a lot of developing countries.
Excellent. You know, they didn't patent them.
That's great. Yeah.
Actually, Jonas Salk's response when he was asked if he would patent it was,
you can't patent the son.
Oh my god. I know.
I got a good cut. I got a better cut. A lot of the vaccine effort to get to get it out and vaccine,
vaccinate all the kids was funded by the March of Dimes, which we're familiar with.
FDR was instrumental in this effort in creating public awareness of the, you know, of polio, the importance of the vaccine, the cost, both in physical
loss of ability and money in treating people with polio, and long-term rehabbing people with polio.
And he changed the way that we look at public health and people with disabilities forever.
You know?
Uh, so...
Justin's got to stop crying. Stop crying for a second.
And also, get your kids vaccinated.
Get your kids vaccinated.
Polio only exists in a few places on Earth now.
We're still working on eradicating it worldwide.
We can, we can do that.
But you can do your part by just keep getting vaccinated.
Yep.
And thank your lucky stars and talk to your grandparents.
Yeah, talk to your grandparents.
Let's give this polyoe stories coming in.
Thank you so much to the Maximum Fund Network for having us as a part of their podcast.
Family, there's a ton of great shows you can go listen to.
Jordan Jesse Go, lady to lady, one bad mother.
Stop podcasting yourself.
There are many for you to enjoy.
My brother, my brother, and me.
Thank you, dear.
You could listen to the adventure zone. It's a D&D podcast. I do with my brothers and my dad my wife doesn't listen
But maybe you could maybe you like it more than she might I don't know. I mean it's Dean. I don't
Okay, you listen to it. Let me know if you like
And we're on Twitter at solbones and we had chervaune addresses. I'm at Justin McRoy. And I'm at Sydney McRoy. S-Y-D-N-E-E.
And thanks to the taxpayers for letting us use their song
Medicines, they're the taxpayers on Twitter.
If you want to go thank them and then buy their music
and I'm sure they would appreciate that.
They're at DIY punk bands.
I'm sure they'd appreciate a little extra cash in their pocket.
And that's going to do for us until next time we have a medical
issue for you till next Wednesday. I'm just from Acroix.
I'm Sydney McRoy.
As always, don't drill a hole in your head.
Alright!
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