David Oshinsky's Polio: An American Story

Polio: An Eradicated Disease It was unthinkable for someone to contract polio if they were born in the 1960s or later in America. To that generation and after, polio was just another fleeting disease. People born before this time period are reminded how frightening the disease was, which debilitated thousands of people. The spread of polio could not seem to be stopped until a vaccine was found. Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky describes the stories of how polio was triumphed.

In January 1705, he married Jerusha Minot and they had eight children. Boylston was mainly famous for being the first American surgeon of the English Colonies in North America to introduce a great medical and surgical accomplishment of inoculation for smallpox in 1721

Danvers State Hospital started undergoing construction around 1874 and patients weren’t admitted until May 1st, 1878. During the reconstruction time period of the Civil War. Danvers building structure was made from materials in the local area that cost $1.5 million. This building structure will give the hospital the name ‘the castle on the hill. The structure was belief to cure patients and eliminate “the darkest, most cheerless, and worst ventilated parts.” The building was divide into sections, placing patients based on the needed care.

Hannah Allen History 2 Coach Jones February 26, 2016 The Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle in American history, was the first battle of the civil war fought on Northern territory. It was fought along Antietam Creek, at Sharpsburg, Maryland, and resulted in 23,000 soldiers either killed or wounded in battle. After Second Manassas, General Robert E. Lee went into Maryland, assuming that the possibility of beneficial resources for his cause excused his invasion of the Confederate defensive policy. His complicated plan split his small army. It was doomed from the start when a lost copy of the plan found its way to the Union commander, General McClellan.

Washington implemented the same act in 2008 followed by Vermont in 2013 which is the first state to pass through legislative process. In order for patients to use prescriptions from their physicians for self administration of lethal medications, patients must meet multiple requirements. Death with Dignity National Center requires patients to be an adult who are eighteen years of age or older, a resident of one of the three legalized states, capable to make and communicate health care decisions, and patients must be diagnosed with a terminal illness that will soon lead to death within six months (Death with Dignity National Center). After all these requirements have been met, patients will be eligible to request lethal prescriptions from a licensed physician. To receive a prescription, the prescribing physician and a consulting physician must agree to another multiple set of conditions.

In the 2009, implementation was delayed from the original implementation date of October 2011 until October 2013. In September 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a one-year delay, changing the final compliance date to October 2014. In March 2014, Congress voted to delay ICD-10 again until October 1, 2015. (www.coalitionforicd10.org, 2015) The change not only affected large hospitals and billing companies but also small, private medical offices. Any healthcare related facility covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) must be able to successfully conduct health care transactions using ICD-10 diagnosis and

Vaccination, How It started “In 1790’s, Edward Jenner’s an English doctor, first to study and report the effects of the use of cowpox vaccination to prevent smallpox” (History of vaccines, 2005). Smallpox was believed to have existed way back in ancient times, from the time of the pharaoh through the Roman Empire and up to the present. It has caused the death of hundreds and thousands of people in the 1800’s. Dr. Edward Jenner was alarmed with the rising of death in Europe, started his experiment by taking a pus sample of the cowpox virus of an infected cow and injected it to another infected cow and after sometime, the cow survived. Then he asked permission from the parents of the child who was infected with smallpox and tried injecting

Once the child recovered from the cowpox disease, Jenner then tried to infect the child with smallpox, but the young man proved to be immune. “It seemed that this attempt at vaccination had worked. But Jenner had to work on for two more years before his discovery was considered sufficiently tested by the medical profession to permit widespread introduction.” (Alexander, 2003). Beginning in 1831 and ending in 1835, due to increasing vaccination, smallpox deaths were down to one in a thousand. The year of 1853 deemed obligatory for all children born after the first of August to receive routine immunizations.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. ALS is also named Lou Gehrig’s disease because he was the first person to bring ALS to a national attention in the 1930’s. Lou Gehrig’s amazing professional baseball career was ended short by this horrific disease. There are multiple treatments for ALS, but no cure for this fatal disease. In 2014, ALS was brought to major attention by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

Tom Geisbert- Tom Geisbert was used to show the discovery and threat of Ebola. Tom is the first to discover the strain Ebola Reston which is threatening the population of Washington D.C. and the United States. Tom is not only the first to discover the strain, but accidently smells it, creating suspense for his possible death. Nancy Jaax- Nancy Jaax is a major focus in The Hot Zone story as it somewhat revolves around her and her family. Nancy is an employee at USAMRIID when the Ebola Reston virus breaks out.

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist published a paper claiming that there were eight children who first displayed signs of ASD within a month following their MMR vaccination. He said that all of the children had gastrointestinal symptoms that were revealed via endoscopy. It was his belief that the MMR vaccine had caused intestinal inflammation that caused peptides to move into the bloodstream where they traveled to the brain and affected development. He did not take into consideration the need to use control subjects, or that in several ASD cases the subject did not have gastrointestinal symptoms or that MMR does not cause inflammation of the intestines. He also failed to collect data systematically or completely.

The Creation of the First Vaccine The history of vaccinations starts in 1796 with the story of an English country doctor named Edward Jenner, who performed the very first vaccination the world had ever seen. (Baxby). By transferring some pus from a cowpox lesion that was on a servant’s hand, Jenner successfully inoculated an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps. Six weeks later, Jenner confirmed his belief that he was successful in inoculating the boy when he noticed that, although there were two sites on Phipps’s arm with smallpox, the boy was completely unaffected by this, as well as subsequent, exposures. Based on twelve very similar experiments and several additional case histories he had since the 1770s, Jenner published his Inquiries into