#知识创作人第七季 #
#给孩子的科普 #
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the American "iron-lunged man" Paul. Alexander</h1>
74-year-old American Paul. Alexander was a lawyer, and a few years earlier he had been representing some cases, but when he was almost seventy years old, he could no longer continue his work as a lawyer because the closest and most dependent partner of his life, on strike.
It was an "iron lung." From the age of 6, Alexander had to rely on this "iron lung" to survive, and if he left the "iron lung", he could not breathe on his own, and could only suffocate to death.
Alexander needs to find a way to save the "iron lung" on the verge of strike and save his own life as soon as possible.
Yes, Alexander was a "polio" sufferer, a condition that, as the world's scientific name goes, is polio.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > polio (simple concept and history</h1>).
Medical historians tell us that polio may be as old as humans.
Although few traces of the disease have survived throughout history, there is indeed a convincing evidence of an ancient Egyptian stone pillar preserved in the Carlsberg Museum of Sculpture in Copenhagen depicting a young priest with a scepter propped up obliquely on his chest, his left leg upright, while his right leg was visibly slender and weak, standing on the ground in a strangely curved manner.
For more than three thousand years since this evidence appeared, there has been no clear record or explanation of the disease.
Only in the ancient Chinese medicine classic "The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic", there are observations and descriptions of "impotence" that are slightly related, but because the description is too general and involves various neuromuscular diseases, it cannot accurately correspond to polio.
It was not until the 1870s that it was assumed that this was an acute form of anterior spinal polio. We Chinese the habit of calling "polio" once a term for this condition, because it does occur more often in children.
However, as more elderly children and even adults developed the disease, the medical community finally chose the name "polio", which means the inflammation of gray matter.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > president Roosevelt, a well-known adult patient</h1>
When it comes to adult patients with polio, the most noteworthy is that of US President Franklin. Roosevelt.
He is known for his new policies and leadership of World War II, and few people notice that the president's inability to move is actually due to polio.
In 1921, one day in the middle of the summer in August, the 39-year-old Roosevelt had just participated in a forest firefighting and then jumped into the cold waters for a swim, and he did not expect that such a move would lead to terrible consequences that would affect the rest of his life.
Just a few hours later, Roosevelt suddenly felt pain in his legs, his lower body quickly lost consciousness, and he also had symptoms of fever and chills, all of which pointed to the infectious disease "polio" that was invading many parts of the United States.
After a doctor's diagnosis confirmed this incredible result, Roosevelt did contract "polio"—an infectious disease that most people at the time considered a childhood disease.
He is considered the most famous "polio" patient not only because Roosevelt was an adult infected person and later became president of the United States, but also because he founded the National Polio Foundation in 1938 to support the prevention and research of polio.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > alarming mortality rate</h1>
President Roosevelt empathized with the impact and panic caused by polio.
The polio outbreak in Brooklyn, New York, in 1916, killed nearly a quarter of patients;
Later, in 1955, the mortality rate of polio in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China, was even higher than a quarter.
In other words, one of the four confirmed cases will die.
The extremely high mortality rate has provoked desperate panic. People expect research in medical science to bring about breakthroughs and changes.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > a relay for scientific research in polio</h1>
For medical scientists, polio is an infectious disease that has long since entered the research relay.
A hundred years before the roosevelt Foundation was founded, Jagbe. Dr. Hine had already given a medical report, and based on the one hundred and fifty cases he had, he speculated that the condition was most likely caused by a spinal cord injury.
His suspicions, 26 years later, in 1866, were confirmed by a French pathologist that, through pathological dissection, it was clear that the patient's spinal cord horn cells were significantly damaged.
The next thing to solve, of course, is - how do these damages come about?
The baton was handed over to the Austrian scientist Karl. In Landsteiner's hands, in 1908, Landsteiner obtained permission from a grieving mother to extract bone marrow from her son, who had just died of polio. This bone marrow is crushed into a milky liquid and injected into the experimental monkeys.
In this way, Landsteiner successfully isolated the virus in the spinal cord. The pathogen of polio is thus clear, which is caused by a type of viral infection.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > a key problem in vaccine preparation</h1>
Obviously, to stop such viruses from invading and infecting people, the preparation of vaccines is necessary.
At this point, scientists are faced with several key questions -
First of all, there is a need for a clearer and more accurate understanding of the virus to determine how many types of viruses there are;
Secondly, when the virus infects the human body, how does it work and how does it work in the human body?
Finally, to prepare a vaccine, a large number of viruses need to be cultivated, and how can this be achieved?
(To be continued)