Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma(abcnews.com)
80 pointsby daniel_iversen9 hours ago9 comments
  • MajorTakeaway7 hours ago
    Drinking a beer for her, she went to the high school very close by. I'm far too young to remember polio but still remember my grandparents talking about it. They had died of Covid-19 before her.

    Something to remember by her is that the determination to live is something that keeps us going.

  • yen223an hour ago
    I often think about how nearly everyone in my parent's generation knew someone with polio, but I know nobody from my generation in the world who had polio
  • odo12422 hours ago
    Her self-created obituary, if anyone’s curious: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/shawnee-ok/martha...
  • warshinder2 hours ago
    Wild bad luck. Polio and despite vaccination she got Covid not once but twice and died of sequelei! And recently married. That is like lightening striking, again and again and again and again.
    • hyperman1an hour ago
      It might be more of a weakened immune system thing. Everyone gets small lightning strikes all the times, but our defences stop it before it gets too bad. So when defences are failing, you see a long string of random unlucky stuff happening .

      Same for computer services going down regularly, or sequences of small industrial accidents, or even humans being non-stop unlucky.

  • testingonetwo348 hours ago
    Her optimism and creativity to overcome the disability and live her life is powerfully inspirational.

    I wish I could apply that optimism to my perception of a societal shift away from disability accomodations and the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy... Enabling parents to foster unvaccinated children is a guarantee that we'll get a resurgence of this type of disease.

    I recommend everyone educate themselves on our immune system: the book "Immune" (ISBN: 1529360684) introduces the vast complexity in a very approachable manner. Also the podcasts through MicrobeTV by Vincent Racaniello are excellent.

  • tonyhart76 hours ago
    its crazy that humankind can effectively end disease
    • darth_avocado5 hours ago
      We can, but if we’re not careful, it can come back.

      After eradicating polio for decades, we saw a case for the first time in 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/

      And given the drop in rates of immunization post covid, we can very expect more if the trend continues.

      • pfannkuchen5 hours ago
        [flagged]
        • kg5 hours ago
          Read up on herd immunity. The problem isn't specifically 'foreigners' but the general question of whether enough people are vaccinated to prevent the disease from roaring back when it inevitably - it is not possible to stop people from bringing diseases into the country - reoccurs.
          • pfannkuchen4 hours ago
            [flagged]
            • nucleardog4 hours ago
              Because your entire premise here sort of betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept?

              So we stop vaccinating people here, and require everyone that enters be vaccinated. Problem solved!

              Except not really, because people here travel to foreign places. So also everyone that _leaves_ here needs to be vaccinated as well. But that's do-able.

              Except, and here's the part where "herd immunity" is important: Being vaccinated doesn't prevent contracting the disease 100% of the time. The reason vaccines are effective isn't "you can never get the disease", it's because "if you get it, it can't spread to enough people to sustain itself into an outbreak".

              If you require people traveling into or out of the country to be vaccinated and stop vaccinating at home, you're going to have someone bring polio back fairly quickly. The vaccine is not 100% effective, and polio is asymptomatic in about 75% of cases so many carriers wouldn't even know they have it.

              In a vaccinated population, that's not a problem. The effective reproduction rate is <1. For every person infected, less than one other will contract it. It does out quickly.

              In your unvaccinated population, the R0 is 5-7. For every person infected, five to seven others will be infected. The growth will explode quickly and given the rate of asymptomatic carriers there's no chance you're going to contain it.

              (Also have you ever watched any zombie virus/fungus/etc show? Even if the vaccine is 100% effective, do you really want to hang the health of the whole country on nobody ever messing up vaccine administration, nobody lying, nobody faking paperwork, etc?)

              So everyone has to be vaccinated anyway, and if they're all vaccinated anyway the risk of letting a potential carrier in is... pretty near nil in the grand scheme of things.

              Your options are:

              * Never let anyone in or out. (But honestly, it'll still probably get in. See: lying.)

              * Eradicated the disease globally. We can do it, but less likely to happen now with USAID shut down.

              * Vaccinate at home so when the disease gets in the country it doesn't spread.

            • BrenBarn4 hours ago
              You could, but if you have herd immunity, you don't need to, and if you don't have herd immunity, it's a losing battle.
    • globular-toast3 hours ago
      Well, "can" is debatable. The only one we've effectively eradicated is smallpox and that was almost 50 years ago. Of course we couldn't actually eradicate it, though, and kept samples for "research purposes".
      • bawolff2 hours ago
        Well also Rinderpest, but i suppose you meant human disease.

        Personally i'd call smallpox as actually eradicated despite the samples. I think its fair to call other diseases effectively eradicated, even if they aren't total. If less than 10 people in the world are dying per year, that is effective eradication even if not total

    • summa_tech4 hours ago
      Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk.

      The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of it will not cause paralysis, it can and occasionally does mutate back into a pathogenic variant.

      So we're sort of maintaining a reservoir of polio, really.

      • bawolff2 hours ago
        Hopefully though we will slowly wean off the live vaccine. For the most part the live vaccine is only used in developing countries. There are a bunch of factors that make that difficult but i think eventually we will get there.
      • cubefox4 hours ago
        Source?
  • sbseitz4 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • lisper3 hours ago
      Making polio great again.
    • WalterBright2 hours ago
      Before the covid vaccination was available, I read that being recently vaccinated for polio reduces the covid risk by 5% or so. I thought what the heck, and was re-vaccinated for polio.

      I went down the list and got re-vaccinated for the usual set of childhood vaccines, as their efficacy fades over time.

  • rekoros4 hours ago
    And a good day to you, sir!