Each room off the corridor had been turned into a dormitory of tragically sick kids. Their families seemed eerily related by the flimsy, blue paper gowns and the masks they all wore. Each new image was indelibly stamped into my mind, and then into my soul.
The doctor walking beside me was named Lewis Lavine, and he was the hospital’s director of pediatrics. He was tall and somewhat gawky, and his black pompadour made him look even taller, but I found him heroic in his own way. Dr. Lavine had the presence of a rock in a sea of chaos. He was giving me the grand tour when clearly he had no time for it.
The same deeply mysterious plague had just broken out in Boston. Before I left for LA, I saw the devastation at St. Catherine’s, a very large hospital run by the Church. The archdiocese had sent me to LA. on a fact-finding mission. I was their investigator.
“You know what it is, don’t you?” I asked Lavine as we walked hurriedly down the hall.
“Yes, of course,” he told me, but seemed reluctant to go further, to actually give a name to the horror. Then he spoke gravely. “It’s basically poliomyelitis, only this time the virus is faster, even deadlier, and it seems to have appeared out of nowhere.”
I nodded. “It’s the same in Boston. I talked for over an hour with Dr. Albert Sassoon at St. Catherine’s. He’s a terrific doctor, but he’s baffled, too. It’s polio—the second coming of the dreaded disease.”
Polio had once been a killer plague that attacked more than six hundred fifty thousand people, mostly children. It killed some twenty percent of the infected, receding from the rest like a lethal tide, leaving behind deformed limbs and crippled spines, bodies that would never heal. Dr. Salk’s and the Sabin vaccines had eradicated polio, ostensibly for good. There had been only a handful of cases in this country since 1957. But this present, mysterious epidemic had a much higher fatality rate than the polio of old.
“All of these children were vaccinated?” I asked.
Lavine sighed. “Most of them. It doesn’t seem to matter. We’re looking at the Son of Polio,” he said. “The old menace with a new, more potent kick. It rushed past the old vaccine without blinking. Some of the World Health people think a broken sewer line contaminated a water source, and that’s how it spread. But in Los Angeles we don’t know how the hell it originated. Here. In Boston. Or wherever it breaks out next. And we certainly don’t know how to stop it.”
As if to emphasize his point, he looked around at the sick children–the dying children. Many of them wouldn’t be going home, and that was so sad, so incomprehensible.
“No, Doctor, neither do the doctors in Boston. They don’t know how this could have happened. But it did. What the hell is going on?”
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