Death by suffocation

You might have missed the news this past June, July, then August (yes, just this last Friday) of this year. Each month marked a new case of polio in Papua New Guinea. Polio: The greatest epidemic in history ever to strike North America. Tens of thousands of adults but mostly children died from the virus. Thousands of children had their legs amputated then re-oriented and re-attached so they might walk again. Or leg braces were custom-made to enable them to walk like Forest Gump in the movie Forest Gump. And thousands of kids ended up in iron lungs—a quickly thrown together, huge apparatus designed to help a child breathe that often ended up being their coffin. The iron lung was a large diameter piece of steel pipe sealed at one end. Inside was a flat surface, a bed, that could be extended out of the lung for a child to be loaded on, returned inside, and the head was surrounded with a rubber membrane. This allows the large, blacksmith-sized bellows beneath to force air into and out of the chamber, thus forcing the child’s lungs to inhale and exhale. You see…

Polio is a virus, poliomyelitis, that attacks the neurons that cause each muscle cell to contract and return to normal length. With the neuron dead, the muscle cannot function. Children were the most vulnerable because their immune systems were in the developmental stages and less able to fight this virus. The toll was the loss of muscle control in 90 percent of the body. No muscle control in the lungs, no breathing; no muscle control in the throat, no swallowing or the child would choke…and the child would die. With 90 percent of the legs muscles inoperable, walking was nearly or completely impossible and often would result in the twisting and deforming of the legs thus the need for amputation and re-attachment. If you were to visit Louisville, Kentucky, you can find the polio hospital in the southeast section of the city—the old, wealthy area. It’s a beautiful stone complex on a former horse breeding and racing farm. When built many, many years ago, they left the former stables all in a row and those stables became the workshops for people building custom leg braces, modified shoes, and such. The amputations in the hospital were innumerable.

Why should you care? If you or your children haven’t been immunized, get immunized. It’s an oral vaccine. Protect yourselves. But we have another problem—tourism. I can only guess that there are many people who come here both bearing new diseases (man, I hope our health department is on top of things—too much to ask?) and vulnerable to polio because they have not been vaccinated. Papua New Guinea will have provided it population with almost a million vaccine dosages in the past two months—do you think they were prepared? Nope. So, you and I should be aware of how the virus spreads so quickly—hotels. That’s right: Hotels (and on the mainland, motels). If you travel to the mainland or have been there in the past, you may have noticed in some hotels and motels the presence of paper bands around the toilet seats and lids in each room. They usually say something like “Sanitized for your protection” (not “Cleaned…”). For the longest time, hotels and motels simple concerned themselves with making a room look clean. Because they didn’t sanitize the toilet seat, the flush valve, the facet knobs, light switch, or interior knob of the bathroom door, the virus spread like wildfire. From someone’s poop to your grave. And, please—I don’t want to hear from HNAMI that they sanitize their bathrooms—I know that they don’t. Their housekeeping people are efficient but not effective. The test would be to place the virus at the locations mentioned, have housecleaning “clean” the room, then bring in a non-vaccinated manager at the highest level of the management team to wipe each of these surfaces then we’ll all wait…

So, there are two steps needing to be taken to protect people on our islands: Every resident needs to be vaccinated and every lodging operation, big and small, needs to train their staff on how to sanitize the bathrooms used by their guests.

Why would I bother writing about this virus? Because I’m a survivor of polio but am dying from polio’s effects. I contracted the disease in a hotel on Catalina Island, California, in 1954 and when a few weeks later was diagnosed, all of our family’s friends stayed away—they knew how deadly the disease was but didn’t know how to avoid it except to stay away—we couldn’t blame them. I was given a spinal tap, the spinal fluid being to verify the presence of the polio virus and was immediately taken to hospital…sorta. I lived in an agricultural community on the coast of southern California. Farmers, when the hospital was being built, didn’t see the sense of tearing down a perfectly good, small, three-bedroom farmhouse and left it—in the middle of a huge parking lot. It was used to store and repair all things related to maintaining the hospital grounds. But when the virus struck, it became housing for the polio victims. This became my home for some time, followed by four years of therapy to painfully learn how to re-learn to walk, swallow, breathe, and such. In 1954, Dr. Salk visited our “home” and, in tears, apologized for not having brought his vaccine into the public arena in time to protect each of us. Here was a man driven to find a cure, deeply compassionate, extremely bright, willing to expend himself to help others, especially the children. Because we now know what can be done to avoid this horrific virus, we would be worse than “stupid” not to take the steps I mentioned earlier. Please, make sure all in your family, extended family, and friends are inoculated. Thanks.

Gary Liddle
San Jose, Saipan