Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (Health & Medicine in American Society)
Like the outbreak of AIDS in the 1980s, polio's sudden appearance created a social crisis as well as countless individual tragedies. Jane S. Smith's Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine ( LJ 4/15/90) described the development of the Salk vaccine and the end of the epidemics that had terrified parents throughout the early 20th century. Rogers's book focuses on the first serious polio outbreak in the United States, the 1916 epidemic in the Middle Atlantic states. Accustomed to associating disease with poor sanitation, bad nutrition, and insect-infested neighborhoods, researchers were baffled by polio, an equal-opportunity disease that affected prosperous suburbs as well as the crowded tenements of Eastern European and Italian immigrants, and black neighborhoods hardly at all. Various theories of transmission were tested and rejected until epidemiologists discovered the ironic truth: Polio had been a common childhood intestinal disease that left almost everyone with lifetime immunity until improved sanitation made the disease increasingly rare and virulent. Rogers's narrative is a readable and well-illustrated blend of medical and cultural history. Appropriate for both public and academic collections.- Kathy Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida-St. Petersburg Lib.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.