The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-07-22
DOCTORS WATCH STRANGE MALADY
Outbreak of Infantile Paralysis
 in Springfield Has Spread
Local Physicians, Much Inter- ested-Disease Difficult to Diagnose and no Cure For it is Known

Springfield and towns adjacent to it are considerably alarmed at present
 because of an outbreak of infantile paralysis. Over fifty cases have ap- peared in the city within month or been reported, while the patients who live are more to be pitied than those who die. Apparently the area of the disease is increasing as a. case was re- ported in Suffield this week.
 The Springfield authorities quaran- tine houses where cases of the disease are reported under the possibility that the disease may be contagious and the physicians there have recommended a general use of peroxide of hydrogen as a preventive. The peroxide is di- luted with an equal amount of water and the nose and throat are sprayed with the mixture. It is believed that the infection enters the body through the air passages. though this fact is not thoroughly established.
 At present physicians say that while they have located the seat of the dis ease they know very little as to it's origin, it's cause or its cure. For that matter it is very difficult to recognize a case of 1t until the mischief is done. Physicians know that something has destroyed a group of nerve cells in the spinal cord of the sufferer just as they know that in cerebro-spinal meningitis certain nerve cells in the brain are put out of business and the patient generally dies. The diseases are allied in some ways but one difference is that the sufferer from infantile para lysis generally lives to be a cripple for the rest of it's life, while the patient having cerebro-spinal meningitis gen. erally dies.
 The sufferers are generally between the ages of months and 2 years though, as in the cases in Springfield at present, the age limit is practically removed, as one of the cases reported on Wednesday was of person 20 slight febrile symptoms and may be mistaken by the parents for any other lnfantile complaint, such as indigestion or the complications attending teeth- ing, and the actual disease Is finally recognized when it is found that the ch1ld'S leg or arm is affected.
 Generally it is found that the child is unable to control the muscles of one or the other of its legs, the part spe- clally affected. being between the knee and ankle. Frequently the child seems to have lost control of the leg will learn to use the leg after a fash ion, though the foot is likely to drag, toes pointed downward, as the child walks. The cluster of nerve cells which control certain fragments have been destroyed and the use of the af- fected limb will depend entirely upon the degree of efficiency which adjoin- ing nerve cells develop. Sometimes the arm as we'll as the leg is affected and the child goes through life with it's right or left side partially para lyzed.
 Recently some surgeons have achiev- ed remarkable results by means of an operation by which they brought a ligament from the back of the patients leg, the front ones being the ones af- fected, and attached it to the dis abled one in front. thus enabling the child to regain control of its foot once more.
 Why the disease becomes epidemic at certain times is beyond the knowl- edge of the doctors who simply recog- nize the fact as they do the other that while, as a rule. it only affects infants, it now and then attacks young people as it is now doing in Springfield. pr. Botsford said yesterday that it was as in it's action as cerebro- spinal meningitis.