1952 Polio Outbreak

Polio. This disease has been around for years, always disappearing for a short while but comes back eventually. In 1952, an outbreak of polio happened nationwide affecting over 2,7250,000 people. Nowadays the disease is eradicated and because of that not too many people know about it. What is polio you might ask? Or where did come from? How severe was it, what did some states do during the 1952 outbreak?

What is Polio? Polio is a nerval system problem and it causes essentially a very severe case of paralysis. What happens is that the polio virus literally destroys the nerves in your entire spinal cord(According to Cdc.Gov), which will cause paralysis pretty much anywhere in the body. It can mutate to paralyze even more body parts. It can also can cause many other symptoms including fatigue, feeling faint, fever, or wasting away,muscle weakness, loss of muscle, or muscle quiver, headache, nausea, and slow growth.

Where does the disease come from? Well, the disease starts with a basic disease which causes some problems in the intestines. Then over time it comes into contact with other genomes which will eventually turn into the polio virus. How it spreads is quite simple-agriculture and water. So your food and water had a chance to have the polio virus.

In terms of severity, the disease is not very deadly. It just truly causes a huge problem which can mess up your whole entire life. The disease can also spread relatively easily. In the 1952 outbreak over 2,725,000 people got polio which at the time was 1.5% of the American population. 1.5% might not sound like a lot but you have to think, all of those people couldn’t work to make money as they couldn’t really do anything.

What does Kansas have to do with Polio? Earlier in the article agriculture was mentioned agriculture. What Kansas does is a lot agriculture! Kansas was what you could say producer of polio as they helped the spread of polio through their crops tremendously. They also used infected water on those crops to get even more of them diseased.

In the end Polio was a horrible disease that affected millions of people throughout history. Nowadays it has a vaccine(which was created by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh) but you have to think about where it came from, what it did, how severe it was, what it is, and what states and countries did about it. Also, you have to remember the 1952 outbreak wasn’t the only outbreak and that 2,725,000 people was only in America.