For most Canadian kids, summer has always meant freedom – from winter’s heavy clothes, and the dull routines of school. But back in the 1950s summer had other associations, frightening ones.

March of Dimes poster from the 1950s. Courtesy of Whatever Happened to Polio? website, Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Summer was polio season. No one fully understood the virus at that time, but everyone knew it could make you very sick. For most people who came down with polio, it started with flu-like symptoms, sometimes including a stiff neck. That was as it far as it went for many kids … though that was bad enough..But other children were paralyzed: in an arm or a leg or in their whole bodies. The paralysis could last a month, a year or a lifetime.

Polio has been around as long as humans have; there is even an artifact from ancient Egypt showing a person who seems to have one leg affected by polio. But throughout the twentieth century, polio struck Europe and North America in worsening epidemics. Canada was no exception.

In 1951, about 2,500 cases of Polio were reported in Canada. The next year, nearly 5,000, and in 1953 – the year of the worst epidemics – nearly 9,000 cases were reported. And those were just the ones we knew about. Chances are, there were many more cases – milder ones – that were not reported at all.

Polio seemed to strike at random. No one knew who would get it, how sick they’d get, or how much they’d recover. And a prosperous, middle-class lifestyle was no defense. In fact, newly developed suburbs were some of the worst hit in the 1950s.

In this staged photograph from 1955, a nurse shows a newspaper with a headline about the polio vaccine to a patient using a chest respirator. Photograph from Polio Canada/Ontario March of Dimes.

Before it got its official name of Poliomyelitis, polio was often called Infantile Paralysis because it struck young children. Now, older children, teenagers and even adults were coming down with polio. And the older you were when you caught polio, the sicker you were likely to get. In the 1950s, many people contracted bulbar polio. This affected people’s breathing, sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for life. The
iron lung became a symbol of the polio threat.

Parents were terrified, hospitals were overwhelmed, doctors and nurses were at risk themselves. During the worst epidemics, doctors were urged to keep patients at home whenever possible, to reduce the pressure on hospitals.

Relief came in 1955, when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced. Over the next few years, cases gradually went down, and in 1962, another polio vaccine became available. The Sabin vaccine was administered orally: in a little cup or on a sugar cube. Within a few years, polio was eradicated in Canada. Now, we hardly think of it at all.

But polio is not gone.

Child receiving the Oral Polio Vaccine. Photograph courtesy of the World Health Organization.

After polio disappeared from North America, the World Health Organization was just beginning a program to wipe out polio world-wide. In 1988, polio was still found in 125 countries. Now, there are only four polio-infected countries, with the occasional outbreak elsewhere. In spite of the success of the program, big challenges lie ahead. There are still cases in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, and these countries have massive populations and a weak health infrastructure to support the vaccination programs.

Polio is not gone from Canada, either. There are still many thousands of people alive who had polio in the 1950s, and they have vivid memories, and stories to tell.

And there’s Post Polio Syndrome.

Many people who had polio in the 1950s worked hard to live independently. They carved out lives in a society that did not welcome people with disabilities. They were hugely successful, breaking down barriers, starting families, making massive achievements in many areas. But since the 1980s, many have started to feel familiar symptoms return: the weakness, the pain and the fatigue. This is something they never expected, and for a long time, doctors didn’t know what was going on.

Now, Post Polio Syndrome is better understood. In order to cope with it, people need to make changes in their livestyle, pacing themselves and resting more. It’s a big challenge, but the people living with it have found a way to adapt, just as they did with polio itself.

- Maria Meindl