COMMISSION FINDS ALL HAVE SOME PARALYSIS

Everyone has infantile paralysis at sometime in his life, it was revealed in recent experiments made at the Medical School by the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission under the direction of Dr. W. Lloyd Aycock. However, although everyone has the disease, only an occasional child becomes crippled. The average person merely contracts a mild form, which is usually not recognized, and from it develops immunity, subsequent exposure to the virus producing no ill-effects.

Dr. Aycock and several assistants are now carrying on experiments at the Medical School to discover why immunity is developed in some people and why others have a predisposition to the disease. "A most striking fact," said Dr. Aycock, "is that infantile paralysis usually develops in children who appear to be in the healthiest condition; healthy in the sense that they show no sign of being "run-down."

"Since the nerve cells controlling muscles are destroyed by this affliction, it cannot be hoped that a cure will be found after those cells have become seriously infected. Instead, some way must be found by which the occasional susceptible person can be made to resist the virus. Immune serum has already been used for early treatment; but the difficulty of experimenting on children, and of finding comparable untreated cases, has been a serious drawback in this investigation. It is known, however, that because of the mildness of early symptoms in some children, the disease would not be recognized in its true form until too late to use the serum treatment."

The Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission, an organization depending upon public subscription for its maintenance, was organized in 1916 for the study of the cause and the prevention of infantile paralysis.

The work of the Commission has, since its inception, been accompanied by a steady decline in the number of paralysis cases in Massachusetts. The worst epidemic in the history of the Paralysis Commission was in 1916, with 1,927 cases reported in Massachusetts. This number steadily decreased until 1919, when only 66 cases were reported. The next year, there was a sudden jump to 693, but this again showed a marked drop over a period of years. In 1927, another serious epidemic swept through Massachusetts, with a total of 1,195 cases being recorded, and again in 1931, when the figures reached 1,429. The lowest year was in 1932, with only 60 cases.