EG Rotarians Walk For World Polio Awareness On Wednesday 10-26-1

On Wednesday, Oct. 26, the East Greenwich Rotary Club’s luncheon speaker is polio victim John Nanni from central New Jersey. Six months before the testing of a successful vaccine, he developed polio and it paralyzed him from the neck down. 

Nanni will tell club members why Rotary International must continue the fight to eradicate the disease and at 1:30 p.m. he will join members of the club in a one-mile awareness walk from Rotary's meeting place at Chianti’s Restaurant to downtown East Greenwich.

Rotary, a world-wide organization, made the eradication of polio its number one priority in 1985.

Through the World Health Organization, polio has almost been stamped out.  However it still circulates in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan and could still escape to countries where not enough people have been immunized.

Rotarians are very close to raising the $200 million they need to match a $355 million challenge grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The money will be used to target immunization efforts in countries still experiencing outbreaks.

Until 1955, when Dr. Jonas Salk introduced a vaccine, polio was perhaps the most dreaded disease in the country.

A 1952 outbreak was devastating, with 58,000 reported cases, mostly children.  It left 3,145 dead and 21,269 were left with varying degrees of paralysis. 

Most frightening to parents was the possibility of their child in an iron lung. In some cases, polio reduced muscle ability and in order to breathe the victim was placed in a negative pressure ventilator, a long cylindrical tube, with only their head sticking out one end.

Most cases occurred in the summer and parents routinely kept children away from anything resembling a crowd and out of swimming pools. Their fears were justified as not washing hands after using the bathroom and ingesting contaminated water were common culprits in transmission of the disease.

Betsy Stevens, who owns Stevens Oriental Rugs on Main Street, was six months old in 1960 when a polio epidemic broke out near the pond behind Vets High School in Warwick. It was one of the very last epidemics and she had received two of the three vaccine shots that would have protected her. The two shots were not enough.

At first it was thought she only had a cold. When she was finally diagnosed she was hospitalized in quarantine until she was a year old. 

A 2 ½-year-old neighbor boy died of the disease in spite of receiving all three shots in the series.

Stevens says the after affects of the disease zig zag through her body today, impacting her left foot, right thigh and lower back. She can’t do sit ups or pull ups, can’t lift her right leg to go up stairs or do many normal things most people do.

“It’s okay,” she says, “I’m used to it.”  

Because she was so young when it happended she says she doesn’t know what she lost, it’s how she’s always been.

She did wear a brace on her left foot until she was about 9 because she couldn’t lift it. Then she had a muscle transplant in her left foot that worked for a while.

Because her right leg was 2 ½ inches shorter that her left, doctors did a femur arrest in her left to stunt the growth and now there is about an eighth of an inch difference. However the legs are different size from the knee to the ankle and the knee to the hip.

As a child, she was always the one in the rear. Between the ages of 9 and 15 every other summer was spent in a hospital. She says she really learned who her friends were.

Betsy’s husband died several years ago, but she has two daughters she says are the best thing that ever happened to her.  She earned a Masters Degree, married and had children at age 40 and 44, something she didn’t think would be part of her life.

“It’s been an interesting life,” she says.  “I don’t know any other way so it’s not like I could wish for anything different.

International Rotary observed World Polio Day on Saturday. EG Rotary's regular meeting date is Wednesday so that's when the local club will mark the event. It will include a visit from District Governor Elect Joe Clancy and some members of his Weymouth club.

Originally published: http://eastgreenwich.patch.com/articles/eg-rotarians-walk-for-world-polio-awareness-october-28th#photo-8162301