This letter to the editor appeared in The Washington Post. Read the full story here.
Do we never learn? The May 17 news article “Fears of spreading polio amid Trump’s threat against WHO” reminded us why constant vigilance is required if we are to avoid a resurgence of the pandemic of my youth in places around the world least able to deal with the human toll it leaves behind.
I know about the human toll firsthand. I had polio in 1949 when I was 4 years old. I remember kids in iron lungs, others struggling to learn how to use the leather and metal braces that would permit them to stand without falling. I remember the empty bed the nurses wouldn’t talk about.
Polio is not just a disease that left some of its victims with weakened limbs or a limp. Thirty to 40 years later post-polio syndrome hits as many as 80 percent of the survivors taking away much of the limited strength the virus left behind and weakening parts we believed were unaffected and overused to compensate. Exhaustion, breathing complications and more can result. Exercise makes it worse and exacerbates the weakness. Seventy years later, polio still keeps taking away!
But polio can and is being prevented. And now the Trump administration is threatening to withhold money used for that purpose. The World Health Organization may well have a “China” problem that needs to be addressed, but not at the expense of the children in Niger, Chad, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. We have a moral obligation to prevent pestilence when we can. The monetary cost of doing so pales in comparison to the monetary and moral cost of new epidemics.
In 2020, I do not want to see pictures of children in braces or iron lungs because this administration wanted to make a questionable political point. Neither should President Trump, Vice President Pence nor any thinking human being.