Nez Perce County was hot spot for polio

EDITOR’S NOTE: North central Idaho and southeastern Washington are no strangers to the spread of disease. Today’s story is part three of a three-day series designed to provide historical perspective as the nation and world battle the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Analysis

The ravages of the Spanish influenza left Idahoans shocked. Fifty percent of cases in the small town of Paris, Idaho, died. The mortality among the state’s Native Americans was 11.5 percent, fourth highest in the nation. The final statewide statistics are unknown to this day, as Idaho did not require reporting until after the influenza had already taken a tight grip on the public’s health.

In 1922, residents could finally applaud something. The St. Joseph Hospital nursing school graduated its first class. The White Hospital followed in 1923.

However, the pandemic left residents with selective amnesia. That is what pandemics do, overwhelming the consciousness and obscuring other mortal threats.

One of those was infantile paralysis, also known as polio. Influenza survivors showed no visible damage.

“The dead are soon forgotten,” wrote British physician John Wilson regarding the fight against polio, “but man left mutilated, man paralyzed, is a source of guilt and shame to everyone who regards him. He cries out for action in a way that the dead can never do.”

The word polio evokes images of President Franklin Roosevelt and the March of Dimes, but north central Idaho experienced its full effects much earlier. In the summer of 1910, polio swept across the Camas Prairie. More than 60 cases were diagnosed around the towns of Cottonwood and Denver, where two children were dead by July 21. Physicians mistakenly warned against houseflies as the carriers. Ironically, researchers finally established by 1950 that a polio vaccine could be isolated from flies collected during epidemics. The flies were victims, not culprits.

In July 1913, Lewiston’s health officer, Dr. Susan Bruce, reported only three cases in the city during the previous six months, but in 1916 the disease reached nationwide proportions. More than 27,000 persons were reported to have been paralyzed, with 6,000 deaths.

In 1921, the Pacific Northwest would be the epicenter of yet another outbreak. Investigators were isolating the conditions under which polio thrived. Water was a common factor, and the old swimming hole and community wading pool were suspects. By the time of the polio scares in the late 1930s and 1940s, chlorine was used widely in public swimming pools as a sanitation measure. Lewiston opened its chlorinated municipal swimming pool in Vollmer Park in 1947.

In 1952, the beds at St. Joseph Hospital were filled with polio patients, with 38 cases diagnosed by September. Asotin County earned an official “hot spot” label. Idaho saw 353 cases. When polio vaccine trials were finally approved in 1954, Nez Perce County’s numbers pushed it to the top of the list. In the early spring of 1955, the new Salk vaccine was administered to selected Lewiston second graders.

On May 1, 7-year-old Bonnie Pound was placed in an iron lung at St. Joseph Hospital after her condition worsened. She had developed bulbar-type polio, which affected her ability to breathe, speak and swallow. Pound had received her vaccine at Whitman Elementary School. Lewiston had one iron lung ready. Young girls from Ahsahka and Moscow died soon after from complications. Pound spent four months at St. Joseph Hospital, followed by treatment at the Elks Rehabilitation Hospital in Boise.

In December 1962, a California court awarded Pound $70,000 ($750,000 today) in settlement of her claim that she had contracted polio from the Salk vaccine, incorrectly produced with a live virus by Cutter Laboratories, which paid out claims in 50 suits. Pound’s was the largest settlement for an affected child in the Pacific Northwest. In Idaho, 25 children caught polio from the Cutter vaccine and passed it onto 61 others. Seventy of the 86 affected children were paralyzed.

Although requiring a back brace and arm braces for several years, Pound would continue her education and graduate from Lewiston High School in 1966. In a 1978 interview, Pound related that “I sat there and cried” when her 2-year-old daughter Sarah received the latest polio vaccine.

In August 1957, Lewiston conducted Idaho’s first large-scale vaccination clinic. More than 400 children and adults received their polio vaccine at a special clinic set up at St. Joseph Hospital. Local physicians, under the direction of Dr. Robert Colburn, donated their time to give injections.

Polio would eventually be conquered, along with another continuing scourge that plagued the valley — smallpox.

Dr. Bruce’s July 1913 report contained another, more telling statistic: 82 cases of smallpox in the city in just six months. She would be forced to take personal charge of the crowded county jail when smallpox broke out among the prisoners. In 1928, the disease had invaded the public schools. Old Webster Elementary, which once sat where Booth Hall is today, was ordered to be shut down and fumigated. Students without the telltale scar on their arms were prohibited from returning to school.

By early January 1929, the disease was spreading through Clarkston, with 44 cases being quarantined. February saw 10 new cases in Lewiston, just as health care providers were warning of a return of measles to the valley, based on the four-year cycle that had been observed for decades.

Nearly two centuries after Edward Jenner proved his hypothesis that vaccination could annihilate smallpox, on May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly officially declared the planet free of this disease. The eradication of smallpox is considered as the greatest achievement in international public health.

Americans had become familiar with the Christmas Seals program, which began in 1907. By the turn of the 20th century, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the United States. Dr. John Alley’s research discovered a terrible truth. As many as 75 percent of the Nez Perce Tribe suffered from tuberculosis. In 1909, he convinced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to convert the former Fort Lapwai boarding school into a sanitarium. At the peak of its operation, the facility housed 450 patients, drawn from tribes across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The sanitarium closed in June 1942.

The increased emphasis on treatment led to advancements in the diagnosis of tuberculosis in chickens, hogs and cattle. Dr. Bruce would regularly report on the health of the city’s livestock.

Alley’s work had not gone unnoticed by county health officials. During the first 10 months of 1936, 102 Idahoans had died of tuberculosis. In late 1939, a special eight-bed tuberculosis ward, the first in Idaho, opened at the Somerville Home in the east Orchards. To this day, small outbreaks are diagnosed in the state, the last major one occurring in Ada County in 2018.

The second pandemic of the 20th century was the Asian flu outbreak of 1957-58, First reported in coastal cities in the United States in the summer of 1957, the disease killed an estimated 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States, 49 of which were in Idaho, a mortality rate 40 percent lower than the nation.

The final pandemic of the century would be the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69, which took 61 lives in Idaho.

Based on the articles in this series, what conclusions can be reached? First, the health care systems in the valley and surrounding towns advanced incrementally. Public sanitation improved and streets were paved. There were no perfect solutions, but local doctors learned the truth of an old adage: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Branting has done extensive study of the history of the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley and is the institutional historian for Lewis-Clark State College.