WAR ON DISEASES
"I think it had something to do with the water supply," Walters, now a Tuscarawas Township, Ohio, resident, recalled, struggling for an explanation for her mother's fears in the small Indiana community where they lived then. "They wouldn't let me and my friends go to a swimming pool in the next town either."
Fear was rampant for no one knew exactly what polio was and how it spread. (Eventually, it was determined that the disease was passed person to person via fecal contact.) And, until Jonas Salk introduced the first vaccine in 1955, there were an estimated 13,000 to 20,000 cases of paralytic polio annually in the United States alone.
Evolving vaccines, though, and a national vaccination drive had reduced the numbers of paralytic cases to 61 by 1965.
The Pan American Health Organization reported the last case of polio in the United States was identified in 1993 and that victim brought the contagion from abroad. Scientists hope the now-rare disease will be eradicated worldwide in the near future.
Polio is the poster child for many childhood diseases that today's parents neither fear nor know much about. Vaccines have all but obliterated the diseases that stole days and weeks from childhood only a few decades ago.
MEASLES, SCHMEASLES
Remember measles? You do if you are 50-something. It, too, is a virus. If one of your playground buddies got it, all you had to do was wait. About two weeks later, you would be flattened by red eyes, a rash and a cough. The cough, even a happy outburst of laughter, helped you spread it to the next person. You were down for a week, maybe two.
The worry with German measles, or rubella, according to physicians, was that a pregnant woman who was exposed ran the risk of delivering a child with birth defects.
Jonas and Stefan Hershberger, Holmes County, Ohio, brothers and Amish farmers, related how sunny the day was in the mid-1950s when they sat near their family's barn playing with some baby chicks. "It was getting pretty warm and when our mother passed by to hang wash, she noticed red spots on us," Stefan recalled. "We knew something was wrong by the look on her."
Their pregnant mother recognized the spots as rubella, or German measles, and knew of babies born "not right," in her words, when their mother had been exposed.
But, though the Hershberger boys and their siblings all eventually came down with measles, their mother's pregnancy was unaffected. A new sister was added to the family months later.
Today, measles, mumps, chickenpox and pertussis (whooping cough) are warded off with early immunizations.
WATCH OUT FOR DA MUMPS
Until you contracted them, mumps were the stuff of comic book illustrations of patients with painfully swollen cheeks. School outbreaks of mumps and the other diseases were common since proximity fostered the spread. A good cough or sneeze and the respiratory droplets produced could travel to the next youngster, infecting her.
If your immune system let it in, mumps kept you down for a week or so. The swollen glands where jaw and neck meet were the junction of your discomfort along with a persistent headache and fever.
Boys learned from their fathers that "mumps could drop" if they were too active during this illness. In truth, what did happen sometimes is that, in adolescent boys, mumps brought with it painful testicular swelling that sometimes affected testicle development and, in fewer cases, caused infertility.
DON'T PICK THE POX
If you remember anything about your bout with chickenpox, it probably was the itching. Your mother would slather calamine lotion on the spots. Or give you a bath with soothing oatmeal in the warm water. If that was ineffective, physicians sometimes suggested putting cotton socks on patients' hands to avoid scratching and, ultimately, infection or scarring from the viral outbreak.
There were early symptoms - a runny nose and a cough - that your parents may have mistaken for the onset of a common cold. But when that blistery-looking rash appeared, there was no doubt what you'd been exposed to. You probably were laid low for up to two weeks.
PERTUSSIS IN PLAIN TERMS - WHOOPING COUGH
Before the vaccine for pertussis, or whooping cough, became available in the 1940s, this bacteria-based respiratory infection took its toll on children. It, too, began its cycle looking like the onset of a cold but the direction soon changed and the illness became serious. Doctors dubbed the disease whooping cough because of the high-pitched whooping sound that came at the end of a coughing spasm.
At Mercy Medical Center in Canton, Ohio, Pat Nelson, infection prevention and control coordinator, said pertussis still is seen in hospitals.
"Even though children get immunized as babies and before grade school, immunity does not last a lifetime," the registered nurse cautioned. "Adults sometimes get pertussis and can spread it unknowingly to small infants before the babies are immunized in early childhood."
Today, pertussis likely is a disease grandparents tell youngsters about. Still, though, in Third World countries, it is a killer. In 2001, an estimated 285,000 children died from it worldwide.
American medicine and persistence from family physicians to local health departments have all but eradicated the handful of childhood diseases commonplace less than a century ago.
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