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Family

19 fascinating pictures to remind us what polio used to look like.

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March of Dimes

My dad had weird feet.

He was born in 1942, and when he was just a few years old, he caught polio. He survived the disease, but it affected the way his legs and feet grew — one foot was always a shoe size or two smaller than the other one. I remember being fascinated by them when I was little.

Though polio affected my father, I myself have never been in danger of contracting it.

In fact, the disease has disappeared completely from the United States, and we're incredibly close to eliminating it worldwide.


But as much as we should celebrate its passing, we should also remember what it was like when polio affected people everywhere. And though these photos may be somber, they should also give us hope; they prove that we can overcome the worst obstacles and most pernicious infections. After all, we've done it before.

Check out these photos of what polio looked like when my dad was a kid.

Polio was a scourge. It could affect anyone. But it preyed most heavily on children.

A child paralyzed by polio in 1947. Photo by Keystone Features/Getty Images.

A young patient getting fit with a respirator in 1955. Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images.

Polio's actually a lot older than my father was. We even have paintings of it from ancient Egypt.

This over-3,300-year-old Egyptian stele is thought to depict a polio victim. Image via Deutsches Grünes Kreuz/Wikimedia Commons.

For most of that time, polio was content to remain quiet.

But in the 19th and 20th centuries, it became a killer. In 1952, an outbreak killed over 3,000 people and paralyzed over 21,000 in the U.S. alone.

Photo from Douglas Grundy/Three Lions/Getty Images.

Polio is a virus passed mostly through contaminated food and water. And as long as we humans were spread out, it never got the momentum to really become a problem. But as cities grew and, ironically, better sanitation came about and removed some of our natural exposure to it, polio suddenly found a weak spot in our defenses.

Children were most at risk of contracting the virus – hence one of its common names: infantile paralysis.

Photo by Sonnee Gottlieb/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

In most cases, it's either harmless or mild, like a case of the flu. But in some people, polio can cause serious, sometimes permanent paralysis.

A paralyzed kid at London's Queen Mary's Hospital in 1947. Photo by George Konig/Keystone Features/Getty Images.

If the virus ends up in the central nervous system, it interrupts our body's ability to communicate with our muscles, causing paralysis. And if the paralysis lasts for a long time, the muscles themselves can start to waste away, a process known as atrophy.

This is already bad, but there's one more cruel twist to the disease. If a child is the one who gets paralyzed, the muscle atrophy can end up affecting the way their bones grow. That's what happened with my dad and why his feet looked so weird.

If the diaphragm was paralyzed, patients would need respirators to be able to breathe. Some respirators were portable, like this one.

A portable respirator from 1955. Photo by Hans Meyer/BIPs/Getty Images.

For a given value of "portable."

Others, like the iron lung, effectively trapped you inside.

An iron lung in 1938. Photo from London Express/Getty Images.

If you did recover, you may have still needed regular physical therapy to strengthen the atrophied muscles. Aquatic therapy was popular.

Photo by Juliette Lasserre/BIPs/Getty Images.

At its height, polio was one of the great public specters. People were terrified of it. Public pools were closed in a misguided effort to stop the spread. Houses were quarantined.

A board of health warning circa 1910. Image from National Library of Medicine/Wikimedia Commons.

There were public health campaigns and donation drives to help fuel research, like the March of Dimes.

A cartoon from 1943. Image from U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons.

Still, nobody seemed safe. Even President Franklin Roosevelt had it, although he was careful about hiding his paralysis from the outside world.

A rare photograph of FDR in his wheelchair. Image from Margaret Suckley/Wikimedia Commons.

It was one of the great scourges of its time.

Then, in the early 1950s, Jonas Salk invented the first polio vaccine.

Photo by Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Salk was a researcher and virologist who joined the fight against polio in the late 1940s. Initially tasked with identifying different strains of the virus, Salk and his team saw an opportunity to try to prevent the disease altogether, and their work paid off.

Manufacturers began to mass produce it.

Workers at England's Glaxo company in 1956. Photo from Fox Photos/Getty Images.

Suddenly, people could save their children from this awful disease.

Photo by Monty Fresco Jnr/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

As people became immunized against it, the disease had a harder and harder time spreading between populations. Numbers of infections started to fall.

And, slowly, polio transformed from a demonic specter into a manageable disease, then, eventually, into a distant memory.

A woman examines a gigantic model of a single polio virus capsule in 1959. Photo from Fox Photos/Getty Images.

Thanks to the vaccines created by Salk and other researchers, most of the world began to forget this disease.

Today, we're on the cusp of eradicating polio altogether. Its last holdouts are in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.

A child afflicted with polio in Afghanistan in 2009. Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images.

We're really close. In fact, one of polio's three strains has already been eliminated.

Photo by A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images.

Which is why the U.N. switched to a two-strain vaccine in May of 2016.

In 2015, there were only 74 recorded cases of polio in the entire world. Just 74!

A Pakistani child receives the oral polio vaccine in 2016. Photo from Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images.

Polio has no natural reservoir. It has no place to hide. Once it's gone, it's gone.

We might never be able to eliminate the flu because it can hide in so many animals, like birds or pigs. But polio only infects humans. So when all humans are immunized, polio will disappear.

We're so close to eliminating a horrible disease thanks to researchers like Salk and workers dedicated to administering vaccinations. There are occasional setbacks, such as a recent shortage of the new vaccine, but researchers hope to completely eliminate the disease by the end of this decade.

We can overcome the worst demons. We have before. And we can do it again.

In the future, the only place where polio will exist is in picture archives like these. And the memories of my dad's poor feet.

Family

'It's not Little Sun': Mom admits she's having trouble pronouncing her newborn's name

It was fine 'til other people tried to say it and now she's confused.

via JustusMoms29/TikTok (used with permission)

Justus Stroup is starting to realize her baby's name isn't that common.

One of the many surprises that come with parenthood is how the world reacts to your child’s name. It’s less of a surprise if your child has a common name like John, Mohammed, or Lisa. But if you give your child a non-traditional name that’s gender-neutral, you’re going to throw a lot of folks off-guard and mispronunciations are going to be an issue.

This exact situation happened with TikTok user Justus Stroup, who recently had her second child, but there’s a twist: she isn’t quite sure how to pronounce her child’s name either.

"I may have named my daughter a name I can't even pronounce," Stroup opens the video. "Now, I think I can pronounce it, but I've told a couple of people her name and there are two people who thought I said the same exact thing. So, I don't know that I know how to [pronounce] her name correctly."



@justusmoms29

Just when you think you name your child something normal! #2under2mom #postpartum #newborn #momsoftiktok #uniquenames #babyname #babygirl #sahm #momhumor

Stroup’s daughter is named Sutton and the big problem is how people around her pronounce the Ts. Stroup tends to gloss over the Ts, so it sounds like Suh-en. However, some people go hard on the Ts and call her “Sut-ton.”

"I'm not gonna enunciate the 'Ts' like that. It drives me absolutely nuts," she noted in her TikTok video. "I told a friend her name one time, and she goes, 'Oh, that's cute.' And then she repeated the name back to me and I was like, 'No, that is not what I said.'"

Stroup also had a problem with her 2-year-old son’s speech therapist, who thought the baby’s name was Sun and that there weren’t any Ts in the name at all. "My speech therapist, when I corrected her and spelled it out, she goes, 'You know, living out in California, I have friends who named their kids River and Ocean, so I didn't think it was that far off.'"

Stroup told People that she got the name from a TV show called “The Lying Game,” which she used to watch in high school. "Truthfully, this was never a name on my list before finding out I was pregnant with a girl, but after finding out the gender, it was a name I mentioned and my husband fell in love with," says Stroup. "I still love the name. I honestly thought I was picking a strong yet still unique name. I still find it to be a pretty name, and I love that it is gender neutral as those are the type of names I love for girls."

The mother could choose the name because her husband named their son Greyson.



The commenters thought Stroup should tell people it’s Sutton, pronounced like a button. “I hear it correctly! Sutton like Button. I would pronounce it like you, too!” Amanda wrote.

“My daughter’s name is Sutton. I say it the same way as you. When people struggle with her name, I say it’s Button but with a S. That normally immediately gets them to pronounce it correctly,” Megan added.

After the video went viral, Stroup heard from people named Hunter and Peyton, who are dealing with a similar situation. “I've also noticed the two most common names who run into the same issue are Hunter (people pronouncing it as Hunner or HUNT-ER) and Payton (pronounced Pey-Ton or Pey-tin, most prefer it as Pey-tin),” she told Upworthy.

“Another person commented saying her name is Susan and people always think it is Season or Steven,” Stroup told Upworthy. After having her second child, she learned that people mix up even the simplest names. “No name is safe at this point,” she joked.

The whole situation has Stroup rethinking how she pronounces her daughter’s name. Hopefully, she got some advance on how to tell people how to pronounce it, or else she’ll have years of correcting people in front of her. "Good lord, I did not think this was going to be my issue with this name," she said.

Joy

'90s kid shares the 10 lies that everyone's parent told them

"Don't swallow that gum. If you do, it'll take 7 years to come out."

via 90sKid4lyfe/TikTok (used with permission)

90sKidforLife shares 10 lies everyone's parents told in the era.


Children believe everything their parents tell them. So when parents lie to prevent their kids to stop them from doing something dumb, the mistruth can take on a life of its own. The lie can get passed on from generation to generation until it becomes a zombie lie that has a life of its own.

Justin, known as 90sKid4Lyfe on TikTok and Instagram, put together a list of 10 lies that parents told their kids in the ‘90s, and the Gen X kids in the comments thought it was spot on.


“Why was I told EVERY ONE of these?” Brittany, the most popular commenter, wrote. “I heard all of these plus the classic ‘If you keep making that face, it will get stuck like that,’” Amanda added. After just four days of being posted, it has already been seen 250,000 times.

Parents were always lying #90s #90skids #parenting

@90skid4lyfe

Parents were always lying #90s #90skids #parenting

Here are Justin’s 10 lies '90s parents told their kids:

1. "You can't drink coffee. It'll stunt your growth."

2. "If you pee in the pool, it's gonna turn blue."

3. "Chocolate milk comes from brown cows."

4. "If you eat those watermelon seeds, you'll grow a watermelon in your stomach."

5. "Don't swallow that gum. If you do, it'll take 7 years to come out."

6. "I told you we can't drive with the interior light on. ... It's illegal."

7. "Sitting that close to the TV is going to ruin your vision."

8. "If you keep cracking your knuckles, you're gonna get arthritis."

8. "You just ate, you gotta wait 30 minutes before you can swim."

10. "If you get a tattoo, you won't find a job."


This article originally appeared on 4.26.24

Science

Florida meteorologist applauded for getting emotional in live coverage of Hurricane Milton

People are finding John Morales' genuine empathy refreshing, and very much needed.

Photo credit: NASA (public domain), NBC 6 South Florida/YouTube

“I apologize — this is just horrific,” said John Morales during live coverage of Hurricane Milton.

Venerated meteorologist John Morales couldn’t help but get choked up during his report on the potentially devastating impact of Hurricane Milton closing in on Florida—a mere two weeks after being pummeled by Hurricane Helene.

“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” Morales began, the weather forecast map almost completely in red.

Tears welled up in his eyes as Morales tried to notify viewers that “it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.”

To most of us, those wouldn’t mean anything. But the anguish in Morales’s voice says it all.


Trying to gain composure, Morales quickly said, “I apologize — this is just horrific,” and continued with his broadcast offscreen, showing just the water map. His voice was still noticeably shaken.

We live in a 24-hour new cycle, which has made us aware of so many global catastrophes and also desensitized to them. But when moments like this happen, when even our ever-stoic messengers are so moved that it also touches us on an emotional level, we are reminded that what happens to one of us, happens to all of us.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

That's probably why so many people commented to commend Morales for showing a bit of humanity—which they found particularly refreshing for a news anchor.

"Please don't apologize. Showing some empathy shows you care and aren't fear mongering. <3 We appreciate it."

"No apology is ever needed for being human and showing what we see so little of these days: genuine empathy. Thank you, sir."

"Your kindness and humanity are not a weakness, but the strength that we all need right now. Thank you."

"No apologies needed sir...for someone to show real emotions for other people...is real concern, real caring."

"He showed a vanishingly rare moment of authenticity and actual empathy, in an incredibly cynical and ugly world - a beautiful thing to see in this scary time. As someone whose family lives in the area that is about to be pummeled by this storm, I am very grateful to him for his decency and humanity in the face of this possible horror that my family are facing. He deserves SO much credit for this beautiful display of transparency and empathy - though he obviously didn't do it for the credit but rather, out of empathy."

"I debated whether to share this. I did apologize on the air," Morales would later post on X.

He also urged folks to read his coverage of the relationships between climate change and extreme weather on The Bulletin, calling these recent hurricanes are “harbingers of the future.”

Global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too," he wrote.

If a professional of 35 years is saying this…yikes.

Joy

A homeless man asked a college student for some tea, and a deluge of kindness followed

The unlikely pair spent the day getting to know each other, and now thousands of strangers are invested in Unc's well-being.

Neither Sanai Graden nor her "Unc" knew what their meeting in a parking lot would lead to.

Every once in a while, a story of two strangers turns into a shared connection that touches millions. This is one of them.

Sanai Graden is a 21-year-old college student living in Washington, D.C., who likes to vlog on TikTok while she does everyday things. As she was heading to the grocery store on a random day at the end of January 2024, she turned on her camera, and soon after, a man approached and asked her if she could help him get some hot tea.

Not money. Not even food. Just some simple, hot tea.

Graden told the man she was going to Trader Joe's and he could go along with her and they could stop at Starbucks. As they walked and chatted, Graden learned the man was homeless, had no family and was suffering from prostate cancer. He has just gotten insurance, but it wouldn't kick in for 45 days and he needed a prescription filled.


Over the next four to five hours, Graden got him some tea, helped him get his prescription filled so he could get some relief from his pain and put him up in a hotel room for the night. By the end of the day, she was calling him "Unc," and he was calling her his "angel."

She left him with some cash and her phone number and then posted this video:

@hustlanani

Please help me help him !

At the end, she said she wanted to start a GoFundMe for Unc (whose real name is Alonzo), and she did just that.

"I'm just a college student, there's only so much I can do," she shared in another TIkTok. "I did the best I could. But that man, he was literally suffering, and it broke my heart…He was so kind…I just wanted to help him."

Her initial video started going viral—it currently has over 20 million views—and people started donated to the GoFundMe. When it reached $12,000 in a matter of hours, she called her parents to tell them about it. They told her she was exactly the right person to be helping this man because she will make sure the money is used to get him what he needs.

@hustlanani

Replying to @The JasmynYvette Thank you so much eve

Little did she know that that $12,000 would soon rise to $20,000, and then to $50,000, then $100,000 and more. As of the writing of this article, two days after the GoFundMe went up, it has jumped the $300,000 mark.

At this point, so many people are invested in Unc's well-being. Upwards of 20,000 people have donated, and the number just keeps rising. As one commenter put it, "He's everyone's Unc now."

Graden went to tell him the good news the next morning when the GoFundMe was around $150,000, but when she arrived at the hotel, he had already checked out. She searched everywhere she thought he might be, even renting a car to cover more ground more quickly, but she wasn't able to find him.

Finally, she shared a brief voice message he left for her that started, "Hey, Niece! It's your uncle," and ended with "I love you!" but he neglected to tell her where he was. After she looked around some more, he called again and and told her he was at church. She told him to wait right there.

She found him in front of a church and invited him to go get something to eat. She said she wanted to talk to him in private, but he was waiting with his aunt and couldn't leave just yet. Finally, she was able to sit with him in her car and tell him about what thousands of people were doing to help him live comfortably and more easily manage his cancer.

She had to convince him the money was his, not theirs together. He also said he hadn't finished writing her a letter he'd started.

@hustlanani

I know you’ve all been waiting on his reaction. I just made it home. Please enjoy it. Thank you everyone for coming together. This would not have been possible without the endless support. This is just the beginning of something great. I’m enternally grateful. God did that !!!

The first thing Graden did was take Alonzo to Target to get him his own phone and some new clothes of his choosing. He even had a little laugh with Graden when she asked him if he wanted to get some floss, forgetting that he doesn't have any teeth.

This story is still developing and there are obviously a lot of complex details to work out as they get Alonzo settled with however much money the GoFundMe ultimately raises. No one wants Alonzo to lose his health benefits, and there are various financial as well as mental and emotional elements to consider as they move forward. But the power of the kindness of strangers to change someone's circumstances, starting with just one caring soul, is certainly worth celebrating.

Follow @hustlanani on TikTok for updates on Unc.


This article originally appeared on 2.13.24

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