A Sunday Guardian headline in January 1972 screamed “Carnival Put Off For 3 Months”as the polio epidemic of the early 1970s shook the country.
The panic was so great that the authorities in T&T postponed Carnival from February to May.
Then health minister, Francis Prevatt said that the Government could not take any chances and the nation’s largest street party was pushed back to May of that year.
A paper from the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care in the United States stated that there were four outbreaks of Acute Poliomyelitis (APM/polio) in Trinidad, 1941, 1942, 1954, and 1972.
In 1954 there were 189 cases and one death in Trinidad.
There were sporadic cases between 1955 and 1971. The outbreak began with a case on November 4, 1971. By January 1972 it reached its peak with 127 reported cases. There was a total of 181 cases and 12 deaths.
A decision was made to send Dr Lawrence Schonberger to T&T under the auspices of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to assist with the polio outbreak.
After the final outbreak in 1972, an oral vaccine was used to eradicate polio from T&T.
Historian Gerard Besson told Guardian Media that “the Government was justified in postponing the Carnival in 1972 because it is the responsibility of the Government to do things like postponing public events despite the outcry that would have come from the public.”
In the same way, he said, the steps that the present Government is taking with the COVID-19 pandemic is very timely.
“It’s just that Trinidadians feel that they’re invincible,” Besson said.
Besson was a child in the early 1950s and said he was vaccinated against polio at that time as the authorities were on a widespread vaccination campaign.
However, he believes that the coronavirus of this era is way more “acute” than the past cases of polio and influenza as the COVID-19 is much more easily transmitted.
Besson said the country’s worst epidemic, however, was in the 1800s.
The cholera outbreak was in August 1854 where there were 50 to 60 deaths daily in Trinidad.
“This was the country’s first real tragedy that we experienced. The deaths actually caused the expansion of Lapeyrouse Cemetery. We have forgotten that because it is not part of our historic memory.”
In 1919 Trinidad also suffered from an influenza outbreak after the soldiers returned from World War 1 in Europe.
The difference, however, with past outbreaks and the current period is social media and the speed at which information travels, Besson said.
“There is more panic now being spread by social media and the way how the world news is transmitted. There are people who put out false news. I don’t know if they want to create panic,” he said.
DAVID RUDDER:Polio did not keep me from living a normal life
There were several periods in T&T’s history where polio had serious effects on T&T’s population, and the early 1950s when calypsonian David Rudder got the disease was one of those.
Rudder, in a brief message via WhatsApp, said that he was infected by polio as a baby, aged one, in 1954. This left him with a damaged leg.
“There was little by way of treatment in those times. Remember, I was just one year old when I got it. Later on, in secondary school, we were given a little spoonful of sweet pink liquid after an antidote was invented and there was a nationwide drive to inoculate the entire country.”
Rudder, who grew up in Belmont, said having polio did not keep him from living a normal life as he did things other normal children did.
“I had a normal childhood. It wasn’t bad then. I played cricket and football like everyone else.”
He said he has never been cured of polio, but it is one of the major factors that has shaped his life.
“It gave me more drive. I owe much of my success to this so-called ‘handicap’ as it shaped my life.”
He reflected on the 1972 Carnival which was postponed by a few months because of the polio scare at that time and compared it to the COVID-19 threat of this era.
“The threat then was similar but not as widespread as this one,” he said.
PAST PANDEMICS
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), as humans have spread across the world, so have infectious diseases. Even in this modern era, outbreaks are nearly constant, though not every outbreak reaches the pandemic level as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has.
HIV/Aids from 1981 to present has killed more than 32 million people.
The SARS of 2002 to 2003 killed more than 700 people. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory disease of zoonotic origin caused by the SARS Coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Between November 2002 and July 2003, an outbreak of SARS in southern China caused eventual 8,098 cases, resulting in 7,740 deaths reported in 17 countries.
The ebola virus of 2014 to 2016 killed 11,000 people. Ebola is a viral haemorrhagic of humans and other primates caused by ebola viruses. Signs and symptoms typically start between two days and three weeks after contracting the virus with a fever, sore throat, muscular pain. The disease has a high risk of death, killing 25 per cent to 90 per cent of those infected, with an average of about 50 per cent.
The swine flu of 2009 to 2018 killed 200,000 people. “Swine flu” was the popular name for the virus which was responsible for a global flu outbreak (called a pandemic) from 2009 to 2010. It’s a type of seasonal flu and is now included in the annual flu vaccine. The swine flu was initially seen in Mexico in April 2009.