What bird flu?

While everyone seems in a tither about the latest Asian viral invader, bird flu, an older and once more widely spread affliction has reared its head in the United States. Five cases of polio have been identifed in small children in an Amish community in Long Prairie, Minn.

Health experts investigating the reappearance of a disease once thought 'extinct' in the Western Hemisphere are saying it appears the virus has links to the vaccination type given in other countries in the world but not the U.S.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, spearheaded by the World Health Organization, Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF, is the largest public health initiative the world has ever known. One of the goals of these groups was break the transmission of polio world-wide by the end of 2005. Continuing vaccinations worldwide for several years would be needed to accomplish the task of eradicating the disease from the planet.

But the new cases in Minnesota have health investigators reeling that the task of eradication might be more difficult and costly than imagined.

Worldwide, the polio case count is listed by WHO as 1,469 with the majority of cases in Nigeria, Yemen, Indonesia, India, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Ethiopia. Soon, the United States will be back on that list since Niger, with 5 cases, is 10th in the world.

The first known polio outbreak in the United States was in Vermont in 1894 with 132 cases, according to the Smithsonian Institute. The last cases of naturally occurring polio in the United States were in 1979 in four states.

A widespread polio epidemic struck the U.S. in 1916 with 27,000 cases and 6,000 deaths. In 1952, there were a reported 57,628 cases of polio nationwide — a record.

But in 1953 Dr. Jonas Salk and associates developed a vaccine and within three years polio cases in the US dropped by 85-90 percent. That was replaced in 1962 by the Sabin vaccine.

In 1985 Rotary International announced its PolioPlus program to eradicate polio on the planet. In 1988, the organization was joined by the Pan American Health Organiuzation, WHO, UNICEF and the Center for Disease Control.

The biggest detriment to bringing vaccine to the remainder of the world is the difficultly of getting to remote places and the suspicion and superstition associated with vaccines. It is that suspicion that keeps some people from inoculating their children, for not only polio but other infectious childhood diseases, including whooping cough, recently diagnosed in Libby.

It's kind of what Pogo, the onetime Sunday comics cartoon character said, "We have the enemy and he is us."

Bird flu is nothing to dismiss but then neither are those lingering maladies that haunt our not so distant past. — Roger Morris