- Perspective
- National
- Coronavirus pandemic
This was published 4 years ago
The vaccines that saved the rock 'n' roll generation, and many more
By Tony Wright
In the middle of last century, the time we remember airily for the end of a world war and the birth of rock 'n' roll, children hobbled around schoolyards in leg calipers and others lay encased in wheezing machines known as "iron lungs" that breathed for them.
Many rested in graves.
Parents were terrified. Their children were being stalked by a virus with a ghastly name: Infantile Paralysis.
We are afraid now of a new, different virus, for excellent reason: there is no vaccine that can keep us safe. Yet. But even as our economy founders and lives are destroyed, we know it will come, because medical teams have developed vaccines that have saved us, again and again, for more than a century.
Up to the middle of the 20th century, and for two decades before, parents were struck with dread because there was no vaccine for Infantile Paralysis.
The virus didn’t discriminate. Kerry Packer, the child of a publishing dynasty, spent nine months in an iron lung, rarely visited by his parents, when he was struck down at the age of eight. Those who knew him well believe those horrifying, lonely months had a profound effect on his personality.
Kim Beazley remembered into adulthood waking at the age of five, paralysed. He was taken by ambulance to Perth’s Graylands Hospital where after a few months, mercifully spared from becoming one of the children trapped in the rows of iron lungs, he recovered and lived to become Australia’s Labor leader twice.
Alan Marshall, whose father was a horse breaker and ran the general store at tiny Noorat, near Terang in Victoria's Western District, gained a fierce determination to do anything others could do when, as a child, his right leg was crippled by the disease.
He became one of Australia's most-loved writers when he produced a book about his childhood titled I Can Jump Puddles. It sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. It recorded his father's mystified anguish at the unfairness of it.
"'They say you breathe the germ in,' he said. 'It's just floating about in the air – everywhere. You never know where it is. It must have been just floating past his nose when he breathed in ... He went down like a pole-axed steer. If he'd been breathing out when that germ passed he'd've been right.'"
No one in Australia fears Infantile Paralysis now.
Two insulated containers of Salk vaccine for polio arrive at Mascot Airport in Sydney, June 1956. Credit: Gordon Short
Precisely one case of it has been recorded in Australia in the past 32 years – a traveller who was infected in Pakistan.
We know the old monster as poliomyelitis, polio for short, a virus that is not "breathed in" but transmitted hand to mouth, if we have heard of it at all.
Thank those who developed a vaccine, most famously an American named Jonas Salk. His polio vaccine was approved for use in 1955.
Those of us born in the 1950s were the lucky generation: we lined up in the schoolyard, a team of nurses brought out needles and, saved from the monster, we were given a jelly bean.
Pupils at Scotch College in Melbourne lining up for Salk vaccine injections for polio.Credit: The Age
Vaccines are the great miracles of the past century, training the body’s immune system to fight all manner of disease without exposing it to actual disease.
Consider smallpox.
Children of my generation were left with a small scar on their arm after vaccination for smallpox. It was the tiniest price to pay: smallpox, which killed a hideous 300-500 million people during the 20th century, was declared eradicated from the world in 1980.
About 97 per cent of Australian children in my childhood could also expect to experience measles.
It was no simple rash: sometimes fatal pneumonia accompanied it, and about one in every 1000 sufferers developed encephalitis: inflammation of the brain. More than 10 per cent with encephalitis died. Up to 40 per cent of the rest were left with permanent brain damage.
In the 1950s, when Australia's population was less than half today's, 495 Australians died from measles.
And now? The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported three deaths from 1995 to 2016.
One of the more common entertainments in the '50s and '60s was known as the "blind concert". Musicians, jugglers and comics put on regular concerts in towns everywhere to raise money for the blind.
Part of the reason? Mothers who were infected during pregnancy with rubella, once known as "German measles", often had babies who were blind and deaf, among other serious problems.
A child gets a polio injection at Broadmeadows Town Hall in January 1968.Credit: Age archive
A rubella vaccine was approved in 1969 and is administered these days with vaccines for measles and mumps. How long is it since we've heard of mumps?
At least those raised in the mid-20th century didn't have to worry much about diphtheria or whooping cough. Vaccinations had been around since the 1920s for diphtheria, which in the decade from 1926 to 1935 killed 4073 Australian children.
That same decade, whooping cough killed 2808 Australian children before vaccinations for the virus arrived in the early 1940s.
But in the blessed decade from the mid-50s, just 44 Australians died from diphtheria and 58 from whooping cough.
Today most people never think about diphtheria, and deaths over the past 10 years from whooping cough can be counted on one hand.
And now, just when we had almost forgotten the greatest gift of the 20th century, a new fear ripples across the world, and we pray for medical teams working frantically across the world to deliver a new miracle of science.