“Polio. I’ve seen polio.”

Last night, I was speaking with one of the most experienced pediatricians I’ve ever met, Dr. Jack Burstiner. I’ve known him for 50 years. I would have known him even longer if I had been born earlier. He lived in my neighborhood, two doors down. He was my pediatrician.

Jack is almost 90 years old. But he still looks like a pediatrician. He’s got a smile a child could trust, now hidden under a white mustache. His green eyes twinkle when he talks about his patients, the kids he’s seen. There are some things about a pediatrician that never change.

Though he stopped practicing in the 1980’s, Dr. Burstiner worked for 30 years in pediatrics, at a time when pediatricians did everything. Hospitals, emergency departments, newborn deliveries, everything. And in 1955, just starting his training, Dr. Burstiner was a pediatric intern at Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn. It was a busy hospital, sure, but it was especially busy in the summer. Polio season.

“That’s where they’d all come, the kids with polio. They didn’t look right. They’d be dragging a leg, or not moving right. Sometimes an arm wouldn’t move, but usually a leg. And all night, every third night, I admitted all of them. It was just me. I’d do the spinal tap, and I’d look in the microscope, and I’d count the cells. If they had a lot of cells, that was polio. Of course we knew it anyway, but we had to tap all of them to be sure. All night long.”

Polio is caused by specific virus, an enterovirus that circulates especially in the summer and fall. It’s spread by contaminated water, sometimes in swimming pools or from unsafe taps, or from household contamination via stool. Most kids with polio develop a fever and then recover, but many develop paralysis of their skeletal muscles. It doesn’t affect their thinking, or their ability to feel sensations or pain. But it can make it impossible to walk or use other muscle groups, and can sometimes shut down the muscles that keep them breathing.

“It’s funny,” Dr. Burstiner said. “It was a big hospital, and upstairs – up above the emergency department, and the wards, the rooms the patients – upstairs were some of the smartest people in the world. They had dedicated their whole lives to fighting polio, and they knew all about it. But we still couldn’t really do anything to treat it. I was there, this intern, and I could tap them and I’d admit them, and then hopefully they’d keep breathing.”

In 1955 there were about 29,000 cases of polio in the United States. Dr. Burstiner estimates he admitted about 100 of those, ten a night, on the every third overnight he worked at the Brooklyn Hospital for one month during that hot summer.

“100 cases, I think I admitted, just in that one month. And all of those smart people upstairs, what could they do? But you know what happened next? The vaccine came out, and everyone wanted it. And in just a few years, it wasn’t 100 a month in one hospital. There wasn’t any, there was no polio anymore. I saw more polio in that one month than there was in the entire country, just a few years later.”

The first polio vaccine was introduced in 1955. By the mid-sixties, there were fewer than 100 cases of polio per year in the United States. We beat it. There have been zero cases of polio transmitted in the US since 1979; the last imported case to reach our shores from overseas was in 1993. There are still pockets of polio transmission, but it’s very possible the disease will be wiped off the earth entirely in the coming years.

Dr. Burstiner and I talked a while more, trading war stories, talking about cases. I’ve never seen polio, but I have seen children die of pneumococcal meningitis, and I’ve seen complications of chicken pox that put children in the ICU for weeks. Those are some of the diseases I may have the pleasure of never seeing anymore. Maybe someday I’ll tell the next generation of pediatricians about how we knocked out rotavirus diarrhea, and HIB septicemia, and HPV-related cancer. Measles, diphtheria, hepatitis A and B, we’ve got the tools to beat these and other diseases. We just need the will to see the fight to the end.

There’s a lot that hasn’t changed. Parents still worry about their kids, and kids still get sick. But there are many diseases that parents just don’t have to worry about anymore. That’s incredibly good news for you and your family. Protect your children, protect your communities, and help be a part of making the world healthier for the future. Vaccinate.

Roy Benaroch is a pediatrician who blogs at the Pediatric Insider. He is also the author of A Guide to Getting the Best Health Care for Your Child and the creator of The Great Courses’ Medical School for Everyone: Grand Rounds Cases.

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