October is Polio Awareness Month and October 24th is World Polio Day. At one time, poliomyelitis raged throughout the world. Today, wild poliovirus transmission only occurs in pockets of Afghanistan and Pakistan: It’s almost been eradicated.
Polio, referred to at one time as infantile paralysis, attacks the central nervous system and can lead to paralysis or even death. The name derives from the Greek polios (gray) and myelos (marrow), referring to gray matter in the spinal cord that is affected by the poliovirus. It was acknowledged as a viral entity at least as early as 1400 BC in Egypt. By 1789, Michael Underwood had developed a clinical description of the scourge. In 1908, Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper further expanded those documentations and, in 1948, John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robins grew the virus in tissue culture cells. For their work, they received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1954. Jonas Salk and his team developed the first inactivated polio vaccine, licensed in 1955; Albert Sabin’s team produced a live, attenuated oral polio vaccine in 1961.
There are three types of polio: abortive, non-paralytic, and paralytic. All present viral symptoms of fatigue, headache, sore throat, nausea, and diarrhea. The non-paralytic type adds light sensitivity and neck stiffness. Paralytic polio adds loss of superficial reflexes and muscle pain or spasms, leading to paralysis. In the worst cases, the throat and chest are paralyzed and the patient needs breathing support or will die. Although most patients recover, many suffer lifelong paralysis or muscle weakness.
There was one documented case in Port Clinton in 1944. Then, in 1948, the epidemic hit the Port Clinton community with full force. Among others, five members of the PCHS football team were infected.
Don Rhodes, well-known Catawba Island resident, was one of those football players. Richard (Dick) Davids, his teammate, contracted polio on September 3 and died five days later. He was buried in Lakeview Cemetery at age 17, one of 87 in the country to die in 1948, 36 in Ohio. His father, a former mayor of Port Clinton, died two months later.
In hospital isolation, Rhodes wasn’t allowed visitors, but could contact his family through a window in his third-floor room. He was not placed in an iron lung to aid his breathing muscles, as many victims were. Rhodes said he never recovered his “physical stamina,” although he went on to live a long life.
Rhodes speculated about how the players caught the disease. He did not seem to think much was different among them, as they all worked out the same, at the same time. The whole team had their breaks at East Harbor, ate the same foods, and went in the water in the heat, but only the five were affected.
Davids did cut his foot on a clam shell. And some of them drank water from a puddle on a tennis court during one of the practices, but Rhodes felt that nothing else was different from the routine days that the whole team endured.
Bill Belshaw, also on the team and now in the Port Clinton Athletic Hall of Fame, had a locker next to Davids and did not contract polio. He said Davids came in from practice one day and “threw up all over the place.” Belshaw never saw him again.
Football practice and games were canceled for fear the exertion and bodily contact might spread the disease, but schools were not closed. The county health commissioner, G.A. Poe, was quoted: “If schools are ordered closed, church services, theaters, or gatherings of any kind must also be banned and . . . a complete quarantine with children strictly isolated in their own homes must be enforced.” It was felt that the community would not tolerate a complete shutdown. The community did voice strong opinions, both pro and con, about the vaccine and procedures. Ultimately, families decided which activities they and their children would avoid.
Polio is highly infectious through nasal and oral secretions, as well as contact with contaminated feces. There is no cure, but prevention by vaccine has proven highly effective and safe, and the vaccine is still recommended, due to the risk of imported cases.