Polio Was Not Just Paralysis: The Era of the Iron Lung

When people hear polio, they often think of leg braces or paralysis.

For some patients, the most dangerous paralysis was the kind you could not see from across the room.

When breathing muscles failed

Poliovirus can damage the nerves that control muscles. In severe cases, paralysis can involve the diaphragm and other muscles needed for breathing.

Before modern ventilators, negative-pressure ventilators known as iron lungs helped keep those patients alive by changing air pressure around the body and drawing air into the lungs.

A machine became a symbol

Rows of iron lungs became one of the defining images of major twentieth-century polio outbreaks.

The machine was lifesaving technology, but it also represented what families feared: a previously healthy child or adult suddenly unable to breathe independently.

Then vaccination changed the picture

The inactivated Salk vaccine arrived in the 1950s, followed by oral polio vaccines. Cases in the United States plummeted.

Most people growing up today have never seen an iron lung outside a museum or historical photograph.

Why we still vaccinate

Polio has been eliminated from the United States, but it has not been eradicated globally.

As long as poliovirus exists somewhere, vaccination remains part of keeping it from becoming an everyday disease here again.

— Nora Phillips, DNP, APRN Central Health | Wahiawa, Hawaii

Sources

CDC — Polio. https://www.cdc.gov/polio/

CDC Public Health Image Library — Emerson iron lung historical image.