Alberta Polio Survivors Warn Falling Vaccination Rates Could Bring the Disease Back to Canada

Pat Murray was nine months old when polio put her in a bed in Winnipeg in 1953, at the height of the epidemic. She was told a neighbour's daughter had shared a lollipop with her and her sister, and both girls fell very sick. Her father later told her that she could only turn her head from side to side; the rest of her body was limp.

Murray, now a member of the Wildrose Polio Support Society in Alberta, is one of several survivors who sat down with Global News because they fear the virus could return to Canada. Polio was eradicated here in 1994, but childhood vaccination rates have slipped in recent years, and doctors warn that this could open the door to its return. There is no cure for polio. It can only be prevented.

The survivors' own stories show what is at stake. Many people infected with the virus have mild symptoms or none, but others suffer paralysis, muscle weakness, permanent disability and, in some cases, death. Bernie Hornung caught polio as a toddler and spent his childhood in a brace on his right leg, until doctors fused his ankle so he no longer needed it. He remembers it plainly: he did not have a sweet 16 party, he had a brace-burning party. Ferne Hymanyk was nine when she was sent from her family's rural Alberta farm to the Edmonton General Hospital, a place she had never been, far from home. She describes a ward filled with polio patients. Both of her legs, one shoulder and her spine were affected.

Decades later, the disease is still taking from them. Murray lives with post-polio syndrome, which can appear anywhere from 10 to 40 years after the original infection, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The clinic estimates that 30 to 40 per cent of people who had polio develop it. It brings gradual muscle weakness and atrophy, and treatment can only manage symptoms. As Murray put it, as time goes by you lose more and more, and your muscles get weaker and weaker.

The numbers behind their warning are mixed. Statistics Canada reports that about 91 per cent of Canadian children have received the recommended polio doses by their second birthday. That is below the 95 per cent needed for strong herd protection, and the national figure has barely moved in more than a decade. In Alberta the trend is worse: estimated coverage by age two, meaning three doses, fell from about 93 per cent in 2017 to about 85 per cent in 2021.

Polio vaccine is part of Canada's routine infant schedule, given in a combination shot called DTaP-IPV-Hib-HB that also covers diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Haemophilus influenzae type b and hepatitis B. According to the U.S. CDC, two doses of the inactivated vaccine provide at least 90 per cent protection and three doses at least 99 per cent. The most common side effect is a sore arm.

The disease was once among the most feared in the world. Before the first vaccine arrived in 1955, it paralyzed hundreds of thousands of children each year, closed pools in summer and emptied playgrounds, and filled hospital wards with children in iron lungs. The World Health Organization and its partners launched a global eradication campaign in 1988. They came close, with only five wild-virus cases reported in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2021, but cases have rebounded since. Those two countries are the only ones where transmission has never been interrupted. The WHO says that as long as a single child is infected, children everywhere are at risk.

For the survivors, the vaccine meant something personal. Murray remembers asking her mother whether her own children would suffer the same fate, and her mother said they would be fine. She says it made her very happy that no other kids would have to suffer. That is why she finds the current trend baffling, and why she says it makes no sense that people would believe misinformation over solid science. Hymanyk says a return of polio would be horrifying. What to watch is whether vaccine uptake, especially in Alberta, recovers.