Miranda Adkins | So Salem

June Long, Bill Long and Danny Long at the Salem Civic Center with the iron lungs that were on display at the ODAC championship basketball tournament Feb. 26-March 1.

Members of the Salem Rotary Club are taking an extra and creative step to raise money for the eradication of polio. June Long, Bill Long and Danny Long headed up an effort to attain and refurbish two iron lungs, machines that were often the only way of keeping someone infected with polio alive, so that a new generation unfamiliar with the reality of polio could understand it better.

Rotary International's goal is to completely rid the world of polio, and local clubs all over the world are helping to raise money towards the cause.

While it seems distant now, a little over 50 years ago, polio was an epidemic disease that crippled and paralyzed many of the humans it infected. It grew from a centuries-old disease that only affected infants to a very contagious virus that affected even older children and young adults.

"I was speaking to a young [Rotary] club," June Long said, "and a young man said that he just couldn't visualize what it [an iron lung] looks like." Hospitals had rooms and rooms of iron lungs, cigar-shaped hypobaric chambers that helped weak polio patients breathe during and after the several-day-long infection. Polio's crippling effects on the central nervous system even affected the muscles that help the lungs breathe.

Brothers Bill Long and Danny Long, with help from lots of folks, put two iron lungs back together again: a baby-sized one and an adult-sized one, for June, who is this Rotary district's PolioPlus Chair, to take with her when speaking to clubs about polio. The larger machine has ties to Salem.

Between 1916 and 1952, the United States suffered large polio epidemics, mostly in the summertime. Towns with the disease shut down movie theaters, beaches, and other public places. In many cases, signs were posted prohibiting children under the ages of 16 or 18 from entering the city or town limits. Locally, a large outbreak in Wytheville infected nearly 200 people and killed 23 in 1950, according to the town's count.

"People were scared. There was a lot of fear because they had no idea how it was contracted," June Long said. Many timelines, like the Rotary's informative slideshow, compare the polio fear to 100 times or more than the anthrax scare that gripped the nation in 2001.

Polio's symptoms usually start out as a sore throat or a cold, and it often quickly moves into paralysis. The worse part of the disease happens within a matter of days, but the crippling effect it has on limbs could stay with victims for their entire lives. Polio is the reason President Franklin Roosevelt used a wheelchair.

The vaccine for polio was developed in 1953 by Dr. Jonas Salk, and the first mass vaccination happened in the United States in 1955. The first live oral vaccine was developed by Albert Sabine in 1961, making it much easier to do mass vaccinations. Between then and the 1980s, polio was eradicated from developed and developing countries, but outbreaks still occur in countries where people are too poor to afford the inexpensive vaccine.

Today, polio is 99.9 percent eradicated from the globe, thanks to Rotary International's initial $120 million pledge in 1985 and their continuing mission to completely get rid of the disease. Since then, they've led vaccination missions all over the world, and raised many more millions of dollars for that cause. Cases are currently only occurring in four countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria, India, and Pakistan, but they are hoping to completely wipe it out with one last push.

June Long says she is worried that polio could reappear in the United States because of people who refuse to have their children vaccinated. One case has the possibility to infect any person who hasn't taken the vaccine.

Rotary International and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have pledged a combined $555 million towards the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Creative club members in local Rotaries, like the Longs and Danny Long, are coming up with ways to bring the reality of polio back into the minds of the newer generations of Americans blessed with ignorance of the terrible disease.