In 2009 June Middleton died at the age of 83 in Melbourne. Many patients were respirator-dependent for months or years – a few remained dependent their whole lives. While the ‘iron lung’ saved lives, the experience of living in these enormous machines was, for children especially, a terrible ordeal. The frequently changing air pressure within the machine made it possible for air to flow in and out of the patient’s lungs when they were unable to breathe for themselves. Large artificial respirators – the so-called ‘iron lungs’ – were built to accommodate the patient’s body up to their neck. Her treatment is considered the forerunner of modern physiotherapy.īut polio could also compromise a person’s ability to breathe by paralysing their diaphragm muscles. She also spent 11 years in the US where she was greatly lauded. Such was the popularity of her treatment that Sister Kenny clinics opened around Australia and in England. In 1932 Queensland nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny rejected immobilisation as a means of rehabilitation and began treating the physical effects of polio using warm compresses and massage. Patients who could leave hospital sometimes remained disabled for life. The standard treatment was to immobilise affected limbs by strapping them to braces.Įven when patients were considered safe to interact with their families, many months of painful rehabilitation could follow in an attempt to restore movement to nerve-damaged limbs. Infected patients, usually children, were often isolated in infectious diseases wards for weeks during which time they were not allowed to see their parents. Swimming pools, theatres and cinemas were closed, and people avoided large gatherings. Outbreaks of polio usually occurred in summer, terrifying communities and causing public hysteria. This was despite the fact that by the 1950s, Australian governments knew that polio was faeces-borne. Until the Whitlam government’s National Sewerage Program in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of homes, poor and affluent alike, were not connected to sewers. In Australia at this time, inadequate sanitation and poor understanding of disease transmission meant that anyone could catch it, but the urban poor, rural communities with poor sanitation and children who put things in their mouths were at greater risk. It is contracted from water, food or objects that have been in contact with faeces or mucous of an infected person. In the early 20th century, suffering from polio was considered shameful and was associated with dirt and poverty. In America in the 1950s, polio killed or paralysed tens of thousands of people. Betwchildren contracted polio in Tasmania, second only to Iceland.įrom 1944 to 1954 polio was responsible for more than 1000 deaths in Australia. It became a notifiable disease in Tasmania in 1911 and in all remaining states by 1922. Polio was known in Australia by the late 1800s, but the worst epidemics took place in the 20th century. An additional cruelty of the disease is that about 40 per cent of patients who suffered paralytic polio in childhood can experience renewed paralysis as adults. More than 50 per cent of cases are children under three years old. The disease may infect thousands of people, depending on the level of sanitation, before the first case of polio paralysis emerges. During that time, polio can spread rapidly through a community.
For several weeks they shed the virus in their faeces. Of those affected in this way, five to 10 per cent die.Īs most people infected with polio have no signs of illness, they remain unaware they have been infected. However, in about one per cent of those infected the virus spreads to the nervous system, causing paralysis, usually of the legs. It is highly contagious, but in the majority of cases polio has either no effect at all or, at worst, no more than flu-like symptoms.
Poliomyelitis, or simply polio, is a sometimes fatal disease caused by a gastrointestinal virus that is spread through faeces and mucous, and ingested orally.