Polio and the “New Public Health”

“ . . . polio epidemics appeared during an era of transition in the American public health movement. Promoters of the New Public Health urged the public to accept the germ theory, but the popular and professional association between dirt and disease lingered. . . . In their anti-polio campaigns American health officials and private physicians turned to the laboratory for therapeutic and diagnostic help. But at the peak of public hysteria they also relied on tried and true methods of disinfection and fumigation. Despite the measures’ contradictions to tenets of the New Public Health, relying on sanitary regulation was partly the result of the laboratory’s impotence in dealing with and explaining polio” (Rogers, 18, 19). “The emphasis on sanitation, then, offered both the public and the medical profession a way to define and explain the epidemic. Polio conceived as a dirt disease could resolve questions of responsibility for the spread of polio; sanitation became a means of protection and prediction. . . . Germs might be everywhere, but public health work tended to divide cases into guilty carriers [i.e., Eastern European immigrant families] and innocent victims” (46-47).