Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma

91 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by daniel_iversen
(abcnews.com)

27 Comments

MajorTakeaway

12 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.

yen223

6 hours 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

PaulKeeble

an hour ago

Died of Long Covid. Been seeing a growing number of deaths in the Long Covid communities. There are >400 million people with Long Covid and growing in the world, if its lethal its going to be a lot of dead in the coming years.

cyanydeez

an hour ago

...she was in a iron lung. How are you at extrapolating the heigh of a baby in a few years?

cyanydeez

an hour ago

let me know in a few years what the last polio patient is doing.

testingonetwo34

12 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.

tonyhart7

11 hours ago

its crazy that humankind can effectively end disease

darth_avocado

10 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.

ralfd

4 hours ago

> suggesting an origin from the live attenuated oral polio vaccine

Without immunizations that would’nt have happened though?

globular-toast

8 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".

bawolff

6 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_tech

9 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.

bawolff

6 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.

warshinder

6 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.

hyperman1

6 hours 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.

PaulKeeble

an hour ago

The Covid vaccination doesn't stop you getting Covid, it just on average reduces the severity of the infection. Covid is still producing multiple waves a year despite the vaccinations. You can still get Long Covid despite vaccination, and you can still die from Covid even if you are vaccinated, thousands do so every week.