Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From "The Last of the Iron Lungs", by Jennings Brown, 2017-11-20:

In the 1940s and 1950s, hospitals across the country were filled with rows of iron lungs that kept victims alive. Lillard recalls being in rooms packed with metal tubes--especially when there were storms and all the men, women, adults, and children would be moved to the same room so nurses could manually operate the iron lungs if the power went out. "The period of time that it took the nurse to get out of the chair, it seemed like forever because you weren't breathing," Lillard said. "You just laid there and you could feel your heart beating and it was just terrifying. The only noise that you can make when you can't breathe is clicking your tongue. And that whole dark room just sounded like a big room full of chickens just cluck-cluck-clucking. All the nurses were saying, `Just a second, you'll be breathing in just a second.'"

In 1955, Americans finally had access to the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. "It was hailed as a medical miracle and the excitement about it was really unparalleled as far as health history in the United States," Jay Wenger, director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's polio-eradication effort told me. "No one who remembers the 1950s, in terms of polio, wants to go back there and be in that situation again."

A little later in the same article:

But even though the last wild case of polio in the US was in 1979, it still haunts this country. "A lot of people think of polio as a disease of the past and don't realize there are people here today that are still suffering the effects of polio." said Brian Tiburzi, executive director of Post-Polio Health International (PHI), an advocacy group for the estimated 350,000 to 500,000 polio survivors living in the US. "If there's a virus anywhere in the world, it could just come back in."