Survivors of polio hope for virus vaccine

The mystery illness that paralyzed and killed mostly children across Canada came in waves that built for nearly four decades before a vaccine introduced in 1955 put an end to the suffering.

That was too late for 14-yearold Miki Boleen who contracted polio for a second time in 1953, perplexing doctors who believed “the crippler” could not strike the same patient twice.

“I had the most incredible headache, like everybody had hammers and were banging on my head,” Boleen said of the first time she contracted polio at age eight.

Her second diagnosis left her unable to walk and put her in hospital for nine months in Winnipeg, which became the epicentre of the illness in Canada in 1953, the peak of the country’s last national epidemic.

Boleen, now 80, is hoping for a vaccine for COVID-19 as she reflects on the fear that spread with outbreaks of polio, which is transmitted primarily through ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person.

Polio attacks part of the spinal cord, leaving some patients with a weakened hand or foot or a paralyzed arm or leg. For others, the viral infection that progressed quickly damaged the muscles in the chest or diaphragm, affecting their breathing.

The lack of a vaccine meant the suffering for thousands of polio patients like Boleen continued as they developed postpolio syndrome, sometimes decades after they became infected. The condition weakens the muscles that were affected by the virus, again making some survivors dependent on crutches or a wheelchair.

When she thinks of hospitals dealing with COVID-19, she remembers a Winnipeg polio ward lined with rows of beds filled with children, and where she was the oldest patient surrounded by death.

“The worst part was knowing that people were dying in the bed beside you,” she said from her home in Abbotsford, B.C.

“In the morning there would be an empty bed and of course if you asked the nurses where the person went, they’d say ‘We moved her to another room.’ But we’d been awake during the night. At least I knew that the person had died.”

An estimated 11,000 people in Canada were left paralyzed by polio between 1949 and 1954, according to the Canadian Public Health Association, which says 500 people died in 1953 alone, with the last epidemic occurring in 1959, when another 2,000 cases were recorded.

Ventilators used for COVID-19 patients remind Boleen of mechanical respirators called iron lungs, which some children at the former King George Isolation Hospital needed to help them breathe.

“I was terrified I would end up in an iron lung,” she said of the long metal tubes in which patients were placed.