From the editor
MEDICAL LABORATORY OBSERVER
Vol. 39 No. 10
Group Publisher
The fall comes in on
little cat feet
*
A
utumn — my favorite season — comes to me on cat’s paws, moves into the space
between my ears in mid-September, and gets into my heart sometime about now.
All year I ache for the nippy morning air, the smell of burning leaves, and the colors that
mark the season: orange, yellow, gold, red, burgundy. My tummy longs for the pumpkin
bread and pumpkin pie and all good things that make up the cornucopia of the fall harvest.
Autumn is 1948 Atlanta. Autumn is riding with a kindly, wizened man in an ancient
wagon pulled by a slow-clopping mule. Jasper, the driver, was born into slavery on the
property where we children now lived in small apartments within the former plantation
house. He calmly watched us tussle in the crunchy leaves or play hide-and-seek among
the tall turnip plants. His wife made a stack of pancakes with Karo syrup for my daddy
and me one Saturday morning; at age three, I thought we had simply landed up in Heaven.
Autumn is small local carnivals with cotton candy and taffy apples or larger county fairs
where the school principal bravely volunteered at the dunking booth. Clowns roamed the
red dirt of the fairgrounds handing out balloons. Boys fiercely threw baseballs at brightly
painted moving duck targets. A lady sat for hours, cutting out silhouettes of children.
One year, in a remote corner of the gaily lit midway, a teen-age girl in a noisy “iron
lung” allowed somewhat hesitant visitors like me to ask her questions about her condition.
She looked at me through an angled mirror above her well-coifed head and smiled when I
asked what the machine did. “It breathes for me,” she said, still smiling. Every autumn, I
still wonder what became of her. Is she still lying in that iron lung with that pretty smile?
She was the first polio victim I met. Later, polio struck several of my schoolmates.
I soon learned that polio comes in on cat’s paws — without warning — and can
cripple or kill within hours. At the height of the polio epidemic in America in 1952,
there were nearly 60,000 victims, among them 21,000 paralytic cases and some 3,000
deaths. There is no “cure,” but with the 1955 vaccine created by Jonas Salk and the
1962 vaccine from Albert Sabin, polio occurring through natural infection was eliminated from the United States by 1979, and from the Western Hemisphere by 1991.
Unlike most infectious diseases that seem to attack poor populations hardest,
polio is indiscriminate — it attacks people from all strata of society. Scores of wellknown personalities suffered from polio: Alan Alda, Mia Farrow, Mel Ferrer, Donald
Sutherland, Francis Ford Coppola, Judy Collins, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Itzhak
Perlman, David Sanborn, Dinah Shore, Robert McNamara, Jack Nicklaus, Frida Kahlo,
Alice Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Wilma Rudolph to name only a few.
The ancient disease is now on the rise, particularly on the Indian subcontinent
and in West and Central Africa. High-risk areas include those that are floodprone; this season’s monsoons have flooded many areas in the Indian region.
CDC statistics for wild poliovirus are updated weekly; at press time, there were
404 cases globally, 163 of them in India alone. According to UNICEF’s health
chief in India, millions of malnourished children — 40% of South Asia’s population — are the most vulnerable to diseases and infections in flood-prone areas,
since polio can be transmitted through ingesting water contaminated by the virus.
While the World Health Organization is making strides to eradicate polio throughout the world, countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, India, Niger, and Nigeria
continue to have circulating polio. In our emerging “global landscape” — in an era
during which our soldiers are coming back from some of these far-flung locales
… in a climate of parental suspicion of vaccines … and in communities where
undocumented immigrants often live under the healthcare radar — this virus (like
others) conceivably could be introduced to other countries and perhaps to our own
again. If not enough citizens have been immunized, the disease again could spread
from one of us to another. And come in quietly, just as autumn has, on cat’s paws.
*Carl Sandburg wrote in his poem Fog: “The fog comes / on little cat feet.”
[email protected]
October 2007
■
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