Polio scare like fear of sex offenders

The three little guys ran through the sprinklers. Later I told them, “When I was your age, we weren’t allowed to run through sprinklers.”

They didn’t ask why. Good thing, because I didn’t know exactly why, except that it had something to do with polio. The sprinkler ban didn’t last long for me. By the time I reached 5, the polio vaccination had gone mainstream.

Curious about the sprinkler connection, I read up on polio. Coincidentally, I discovered some similarities between the fear polio generated in adults in the first half of the 20th century, and the fear sex offenders are generating now.

Polio epidemics plagued our country, peaking in the 1940s and 1950s. Adults got polio, too, but people fretted most about the children. The virus weakened muscles and when it ravaged the respiratory system, patients lived in iron lungs, which looked like hot-water tanks lying on their sides.

Even during the peak polio years, childhood diseases and accidents killed and maimed more children. Yet adults did not fear placing their children in cars, and those were the days before car seats.

Polio struck at random, and for many years, no one knew exactly what caused it. Theories developed that it was transmitted in swimming pools, on water fountains and through the chill that resulted from cold water, hence the sprinkler ban. In response to the unknown, many parents restricted their children’s lives, especially in the summer when the virus thrived.

Kathryn Black, in her memoir “In the Shadow of Polio,” writes: “Mothers and fathers, once tolerant of neighborhood evening games of kick-the-can, of long afternoons spent at the baseball field, or swimming pools, now were heard to say to their protesting children, ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life in an iron lung?’

“A friend of mine, born in 1950, remembers sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan, sweating in the summer heat but forbidden to go into the water because a child had been stricken with polio after swimming there. She recalls trying to picture what this thing called polio looked like, as she stared into the water, hoping for a glimpse of the dreaded, fascinating ogre.”

The polio threat was real – during the epidemic years between 13,000 and 30,000 cases were reported – but media coverage was sometimes more alarmist than informative. And articles often failed to put the “ogre” in perspective. Only a small percentage of victims ended up in iron lungs.

Black writes: “In August 1949, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the year-to-date tally of polio cases was not at an epidemic level, but also said the disease had extended its grip on Ohio. Nonetheless, the state fair was going on as scheduled. What was a parent to think if the disease held a ‘grip’ on the state? Did responsible parents take their children to the state fair?”

Now here we are in 2005, polio eradicated in the United States, along with the fear of it. Our new fear is centered on predatory sex offenders. They can strike at random, so we have restricted the movement of our children, especially in the summer. No one knows exactly what causes sex offenders to do their horrible deeds.

The sex-offender threat is real, just as polio was real. Go to the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office Web site, plug in your address and see how many Level I, II and III registered sex offenders live within a half-mile radius. Scary as hell. However, the informative-rather-than-alarmist perspective reminds us that accidents are still the No. 1 threat to children’s well-being, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics. Yet we do not worry in the same way about the risks we think we can control, such as driving with the children in the back seat.

Polio loomed above children for decades. Many despaired it would loom there forever. The sex-offender threat seems unstoppable now, with no societal “vaccine” to eradicate it.

Is there a miracle solution, a Jonas-Salk-Albert-Sabin solution to this one, too? Hope is the antidote to fear. Today, I’ll try to choose it.