“I didn’t die, did I?”

That was Canadian musician Neil Young’s comment to his dad, journalist Scott Young, after leaving the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) where he was treated for polio.

It was 1951 and Neil was 5 years old.

Scott Young told the story in his 1984 book Neil and Me.

Neil’s symptoms of the dreaded, contagious poliomyelitis virus appeared not long after he and his dad had gone for an Aug. 30 swim in the Pigeon River in the town of Omemee, near Peterborough. When Neil’s fever, fatigue and back pain worsened, the local doctor suggested what his parents feared — he might have polio. The family drove 145 kilometres to Toronto’s SickKids Hospital with Neil lying on the back seat of the car clutching a toy train.

Polio, which attacks the nervous system, was easy to misdiagnose because early symptoms — fever, fatigue, stiff muscles, loss of appetite — mimicked the seasonal flu. It had been a scourge for years before Neil landed at SickKids and it would be even more years after the arrival of a vaccine in 1955 before the threat would be eradicated in Canada.

At SickKids, doctors performed a lumbar puncture — a painful spinal fluid extraction, the only sure test for the polio virus. Neil was put into isolation while everyone waited to see how his immune system would fight the viral attack. The virus might cause only slight muscle nerve damage, or it could be the type that developed into “bulbar,” the most severe type of polio which could lead to paralysis of the muscles that control breathing and result in death.

The Youngs had chosen to go to Toronto, rather than the closer Peterborough hospital, because there were more “iron lungs” in the bigger city. These medical ventilator machines encased the entire body — but not the head — and enabled those with bulbar polio who couldn’t breathe on their own, to breathe.

There was no way for doctors to arrest the virus — it was a case of wait and see. His parents returned to Omemee and were quarantined in their home.

Neil’s case was relatively mild — he would recover, with a slight leg limp. After six days in hospital, his father brought him home.

“Polio is the worst cold there is,” he told his dad.

But it could have been much worse. In 1937, the City of Toronto had been hit with a terrible outbreak when 786 people — mainly children — fell ill and 40 people died of the disease. With the effects of the Great Depression lingering and city pools and parks closed, it made for a grim, glum summer for families who were advised to keep their kids at home.

In Ontario that year, 2,546 cases of polio were reported (3,905 cases nation-wide). It was the worst outbreak since the turn of the 20th century. About 100 died in the entire province. Another 100 died elsewhere in Canada.

The polio epidemic of 1951 that swept up Neil Young included 2,568 victims nationwide, and 1,701 in Ontario. Two years later, in 1953, the epidemic in Canada crested, with 8,878 cases reported and 500 deaths nationally. The Canadian Public Health Association estimates that 11,000 people were left paralyzed by polio between 1949 and 1954.

The polio wave was not unexpected. From the early 1900s, in a pattern similar to the U.S., there had been annual summer outbreaks of “infantile paralysis” (as it was first called) across Canada, varying widely in numbers, from 609 in 1927 to 520 in 1934.

The majority of cases were children under 10, although people of any age could get it. In one to two per cent of cases, polio, which affects the nerves, resulted in paralysis of the arms, legs or the diaphragm. The latter can be fatal.

“Like the Spanish flu of 1918, polio was a disease without any known effective medical response,” David Wright wrote in SickKids, The History of The Hospital for Sick Children. In 1937, doctors knew it was contagious but they weren’t sure how it spread. Treatments were still experimental. (We now know that the polio virus enters the body through the mouth, usually from hands contaminated with the stool of an infected person. It can also be transmitted through eating food and drinking water that has been contaminated with the stool of an infected person.)

Cases started being reported in June 1937, increased in August and peaked by the second week of September. The province responded to the 1937 epidemic with “new technologies and treatments,” Wright wrote. A serum, thought to help with convalescence (later proven to have no value), was provided free to polio patients and their hospital treatment, and some aftercare, was paid for the province.

A province-paid trial also launched that summer — 5,000 children got a “preventive’’ zinc sulphate nasal spray — based on the theory that the virus entered through the nose, but this was a failure. It did not prevent polio and actually damaged the sense of smell in some children.

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The epidemic led to a big demand for iron lungs (also called Drinker machines, named after their Boston inventor, Philip Drinker). Sick Kids obtained one in 1930 but it couldn’t meet the demands of the epidemic. With machines on order, the hospital constructed its own in a basement workshop. The first was a wooden box quickly built with materials on hand for 3-year-old patient John Gordon who had chest paralysis. He was stabilized. In a poignant front page story in the Aug. 28, 1937 edition of the Star, his mother begged the “wealthy” to donate money so the hospital could build more “lumber lungs” to save others.

A total of 27 “iron lungs’’ (made of metal) — financed by the province — would be built by the hospital that summer. The disease was considered so contagious, parents couldn’t comfort their sick children — they could only look in at them through windows.

The virus had Toronto parents on edge. The Star’s Greg Clark wrote in a front-page story on Aug. 27 that the city had become gravely “child conscious.’’

And government officials didn’t appear to know how to handle the anxious public.

On Aug. 28, the Ontario Ministry of Health published a large ad describing signs and symptoms that wasn’t particularly enlightening. It suggested parents “keep your child in your own yard.’’

The same day, Ministry of Health spokesperson Dr. Gordon Jackson was quoted in a Star story stating that he was “inclined to think there would be no great outbreak” of polio — this in the middle of a national epidemic focused in Ontario.

Jackson also suggested that the convalescent serum should be used whenever possible — despite no proof of its value, even in 1937. “It can do no harm,’’ he told the Star.

City alderman R.H. Saunders was the only member of the Board of Health to propose in late August that the Canadian National Exhibition cancel its upcoming Children’s Day because of the polio outbreak. It was a sensitive topic. The city was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression and a lot of businesses and jobs were tied to the CNE.

A furious Mayor William Robbins said, “Do you want to kill the Exhibition?” Saunders responded: “Of course I don’t want to kill the Exhibition. But I don’t want to kill children.”

Saunders’ suggestion fell on deaf ears. However, the CNE’s baby contest was cancelled.

After a lot of debate, public schools were closed until Thanksgiving, when there was little risk of polio infection because the contagion had historically died down with colder weather.

Late in September, the province turned Toronto’s old Grace Hospital into a government-funded polio rehab centre for children called the Ontario Orthopedic Hospital to centralize aftercare for survivors.

During 1937, the Ontario government spent $197,000 to combat the effects of polio, according to Christopher Rutty, the author of The Middle Class Plague: Epidemic Polio and the Canadian State 1936-1937, published in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. This was a huge jump from the previous annual average of $4,000 on polio.

Polio continued to be a major problem through the 1940s and 1950s, the last major outbreak in Canada occurring in 1959 with nearly 2,000 cases. The widespread use of the Salk vaccine (introduced in 1955) and the Sabin oral vaccine (1962) brought polio under control by the early 1970s, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. The vaccine produces antibodies which prevents the spread of the virus to the central nervous system. Canada was certified “polio-free’’ in 1994.

There is no cure for polio and there are still cases in various developing countries including Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Angola and Chad.Years after an initial bout of polio, there can be after-effects that include joint and muscle pain, weakness and fatigue.

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