I is for Immunisation

There are so many things we can take for granted having been born into the developed world in the middle of the 20th century.

I had to think about the letter "i" but immunisation has, of course, saved me from suffering (or indeed dying from) some of the most terrible diseases such as polio.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) by the 2020s:

• child deaths from infectious diseases are expected to be at an all-time low;
• polio should be eradicated, and measles eliminated in all countries;

World wide, polio cases have decreased by over 99% since 1988 to just over 1600 in 2009.

Only four countries, Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, have never interrupted circulation of the wild polio virus, although transmission is now limited to small areas within these countries. A further 19 countries, previously polio-free, reported cases and outbreaks due to imported wild polio virus in 2009.
 

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Any one in the "middle ages" will know the songs of Joni Mitchell.

You may not know however, that when she was 9, she contracted polio. Later she recalls:

"...the 80s were a rough decade for me and on top of it I was diagnosed as having post-polio syndrome which they said was inevitable for I'm a polio survivor, that forty years after you had the disease, which is a disease of the nervous system, the wires that animate certain muscles are taken out by the disease, and the body in its ingenious way, the filaments of the adjacent muscles send out branches and try to animate that muscle.

 It's kind of like the EverReady bunny, the muscles all around the muscles that are gone begin to go also because they've been trying to drive this muscle for so long. That's the nature of what was happening so I had it mostly in my back, so you don't see it as much as you would in a withered leg or an arm. But the weight of the guitar became unbearable. Also, acoustic guitar requires that you extend your shoulder out in an abnormal way and coincidentally some of the damage to my back in combination with that position was very painful.

So being born just that few years later than Joni, when polio immunisation was readily available in this country, is something to be extremely grateful for.
 A perhaps little known Australian woman, Elizabeth Kenny (1880-1952) also had a big part to play in assisting the recovery of polio sufferers.