Dick Durbin: “the Presiding Officer probably does not remember these days because of his age, but I do. When I was a child, polio was…”

“the Presiding Officer probably does not remember these days because of his age, but I do. When I was a child, polio was a scare that every family felt. I had friends in school who were stricken with polio. Some of them, in the most extreme cases, ended up in something called an iron lung. The Presiding Officer has probably seen pictures of it. It is an incredible situation where someone would be encased in this tube, this metal tube that would help them breathe. Many were stricken with polio and ended up crippled, and their lives were compromised to some degree in those days because disabilities were not treated as well then as they are now. Parents did not know what to make of this. No one knew what caused polio. My mother, God bless her, had a theory that one of the things that might cause polio was playing in the street after a rainstorm in the flooded waters. She would just ban me from doing that. ``That can cause polio,'' she said. That was my mother's theory. It was as valid as any other theory in those days. No one knew what was going on, what was causing it. Many Americans lived in fear of that infectious, viral disease that attacks the nerve cells and the central nervous system causing muscle wasting, paralysis, and sometimes death. In 1952, nearly 60,000 children in the United States were reported to have polio, with more than 20,000 cases of paralysis. There was a panic about this epidemic.…”