But at 13 when her braces were removed, she never looked back. When I went off to college I forgot about polio, I married, I became a teacher, I had a son and the years went by. When these folks had polio they lost at least 50 percent of the nerves in their spinal chord and in the brain stem. The result is that more than a million polio survivors, like actress Chris Templeton, have spent a life overworking an already damaged nervous system. Fifty years after the major polio epidemic, people like Templeton find their bodies are failing.
Polio eradication is one of the successes of modern medicine.
Ironically, the syndrome appears most likely to strike those polio victims who successfully rehabilitated themselves after the initial attack. The only remedy is rest. Polio survivors now realize the more they use it, they lose it. Howson said there are many things a victim can do to cope with the syndrome in consultation with an experienced physician, including weight loss, energy-conservation techniques and exercise. It seems an unjust sentence for a group of people who have already overcome so much.