Survivors of polio see similarities to COVID-19

Crippling disease led to closure of schools, isolation

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.

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.

Boleen, now 80, is hoping for a vaccine for COVID-19 as she reflects on the fear that spread with outbreaks of polio, 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 post-polio 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.

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

An estimated 11,000 people in Canada were left paralyzed by polio between 1949 and 1954, according to the Canadian Public Health Association, which said 500 people died in 1953 alone.

The association said public health officials closed some schools and restricted children from leaving their homes, but the measures did not stop the spread of polio.

For Boleen, loneliness was a part of having polio, which kept her on a farm in Gladstone, Man., where she spent more than three months inside and wore a brace from her right ankle to her hip.

“We were kids and we couldn’t go anywhere. The theatres were closed and everything that summer,” she said of 1953. “You couldn’t go to a nearby farm or play with the kids.”

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.

Elizabeth Lounsbury, 76, chairwoman of Post Polio Canada, a program of the March of Dimes, thought she had the flu in 1951 when she was eight and had intense body pain and a fever. She was diagnosed with polio.

“It comes back to you in snaps,” Lounsbury said of the memories that have been stirred up by the current pandemic, including the loneliness of being sick at home.

When a vaccine did arrive, Lounsbury, who now lives near Sudbury, Ont., remembers children lining up to get immunized outside the nurse’s office at school.

Christopher Rutty, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said Canada had about 9,000 cases of polio in 1953.

“With COVID-19 the most vulnerable are in inner cities, in close quarters. With polio it was actually the better-off communities, it was the middle class in suburbs that were hit hardest,” Rutty said.