Medicine: Battle Report

While volunteers toiled toward their goal of $20 million in the emergency March of Dimes, public-health workers pored over their figures last week, trying to decide how bad the 1954 polio epidemic would be. Polio strikes are so variable (not only from year to year, but between regions of the U.S. and even between adjoining states) that the experts could see no overall trend, and the year's peak for the disease outbreaks may still be ahead. This much was certain: in 1954 the reported cases have totaled 12,699—7% less than the comparable period last year, but 4% more than the period's average for the last five years.

Continuing a recent trend, the northeastern states showed heartening declines in polio case rates (see map). In the southeast, Florida stood out as a plague spot. California's total was boosted by the local epidemic in Los Angeles. In sparsely populated states, relatively few cases justified an epidemic rating—e.g., Wyoming with 98 and Nevada with 60. Most hopeful factor in the situation was the absence of severe polio outbreaks in most of the Middle West, which had been hard hit for several years. For the U.S. as a whole, statisticians figured that an individual's chance of being attacked by paralytic polio before age 20 was less than one in 500, and of dying from the disease, about one in 2,000.