What happens when you think you knew what you thought you didn’t know?

Around 1900, America started to have frequent polio epidemics. Starting in 1916, they happened every summer, which came to be called “polio season”. Over the years, they got worse. In 1951, thousands of children died, and tens of thousands were crippled. The level of fear can be seen from a booklet called Polio Pointers for 1951.

Along with practical advice (“keep [your children] away from new people”), it tried to reassure: “Remember — at least half of polio patients get well without any crippling.” As both tonsillectomies and polio increased, a horrifying correlation emerged: Children who’d had a tonsillectomy were more likely to get a certain type of polio (infection of the bulbar region of the brain stem) than children who had not had a tonsillectomy.

This became common knowledge. Polio Pointers said “don’t have mouth or throat operations during a polio outbreak.” In 1954, the American Journal of Public Health ran an editorial summarizing the link between tonsillectomy and polio.

The main evidence was that within a group of children with polio, the ones with bulbar polio were about three times more likely to have had their tonsils removed than the ones with spinal polio (infection of the spinal cord).

Folks, I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

And that’s why to this day, the highway speed limit is 55.

Those of you who have already had their tonsils out, guess what, most likely you also have Polio, now stop being mobile and get yourself into the wheelchair you belong in and get used to everyone calling you FDR. Which actually is a compliment because he is considered one of the greatest presidents ever, so, congratulations on that.

Have a Great Day

You know, the time you spend reading these posts….. you’ll never get that time back… it’s gone. People with Polio can’t afford to waste time…. for example, reading that little bit of nonsense above, you could have written a symphony or at least a brief concerto… but you didn’t. You’re wasting your polio riddled existence on bubble gum and fast cars.

It can get pretty weird up in here when I turn off my internal writing critic and remove some of the filters….