The Irish Polio Epidemic started with an outbreak in the city of Cork in June 1956. There was great panic as six more cases made the news by early July. The reports used the word ‘epidemic’ for the first time, but stressed that there was ‘no occasion for alarm’.
This understatement increased fear, even though the people of Cork were assured this was only a ‘mild outbreak’. By the middle of July four people per day were being admitted into the fever hospital in Cork. The authorities issued orders to curtail the spread of the disease. These orders included threatening people swimming in the River Lee, which runs through Cork, with prosecution.
Speading in Dublin
A month into the epidemic many were convinced that the outbreak had been deliberatly suppressed in Cork. But it was spreading to Dublin, where people were dying in ‘like flies’ in their fever hospital.
Fortunately this outbreak was one of the last in Western Europe. A polio vaccine had been approved the year before. And the oral vaccine became available in 1960. Mass vaccination programmes where employed in all developed countries. The number of cases dropped to nearly zero where the programmes were deployed. And thus the fear and memory of polio rapidly faded away.
But polio wasn’t gone. It was just not visible in rich countries and it sadly became a ‘disease of poverty’.
Good News
The good news Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in 2022 where polio is classified as an epidemic. Every effort is being made to eradicate this silent disease from the world over the next few years, which includes vast funding from the Bill and Miranda Gates Foundation.
Maybe we need to learn more from history
