A viral outbreak is menacing Minnesota, flooding Twin Cities hospitals with patients.
Swimming pools are nearly empty at the height of summer, and the State Fair has been called off.
Large public gatherings are discouraged by health officials, and school districts are canceling classes.
The year is 1946.
More than seven decades before the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life for Minnesotans, the polio virus did the same as it swept across the U.S. that summer. The disease struck Minnesota especially hard, infecting 2,881 and killing 226 — most of them children.
Although subsequent polio epidemics would sicken wider swaths of the population, the 1946 outbreak remains the deadliest in the state’s history. Many who survived the disease were left paralyzed or confined to iron lungs for the rest of their lives.
“Those were nightmare days,” Minneapolis pediatrician Stuart Lane Arey told the Pioneer Press 50 years later.
Parents ‘panicky every summer’
Poliomyelitis — often called infantile paralysis at the time — grew increasingly common during the first half of the 20th century.
Highly contagious, its early symptoms often mimicked the flu, with a low-grade fever, a headache and a sore throat. Severe cases could result in muscle weakness, paralysis or death. Children were especially susceptible.
Medical professionals observed early on that polio outbreaks generally intensified during the summer months, but little else was known at that time about how the virus was transmitted.
“Polio the victor in 35 years of research,” declared a 1946 Pioneer Press headline about pioneering efforts to study the disease at the University of Minnesota.
“First science has to find out more about the polio virus, how it operates and where it comes from,” U of M virologist Dr. Charles Evans told the newspaper. “Then the chance of developing a cure will be much greater.”
The vacuum of knowledge around this potentially deadly disease bred a climate of fear as the weather warmed each year.
Mary Pradt Ziegler, whose mother was stricken by the virus in Wisconsin during the 1946 epidemic, recalled the “polio years” in a 1976 essay for the Pioneer Press.
“Parents were panicky every summer,” she wrote, while “children whined about why they couldn’t go to the beach.”
Hospitals inundated
The 1946 polio epidemic first began to grab headlines here that July, when Minneapolis saw an uptick in cases as the city geared up for its annual Aquatennial celebration.
The city had tallied 92 cases and seven deaths when Hennepin County declared a state of emergency over the outbreak the day before festivities began. At the urging of Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, a citywide quarantine order would follow a couple of weeks later.
“The disease has shown no tendency to increase in St. Paul, where only 15 cases are on record this year,” the Pioneer Press reported at the time. That would soon change.
Over the next month, Twin Cities hospitals were inundated with polio cases from here in the metro and across the state, many from small communities without the resources to address the disease.
The 65-bed Sister Kenny Institute, a Minneapolis hospital that specialized in treating and rehabilitating polio patients, was packed with 180 patients, according to a UMN radio documentary.
With the outbreak reaching its peak in mid-August, Minnesota health officials canceled the State Fair and public schools announced they would postpone the start of classes for two weeks to slow the disease’s spread.
Workers who had been erecting concession stands and midway rides at the Fairgrounds began packing them up again, while organizers of the Great Minnesota Get-Together issued refunds for advance tickets.
Twin Cities educators collaborated with University of Minnesota radio station KUOM to broadcast a “School by Air” series during the two-week delay to offer primers for students on subjects like geography, hygiene and intercultural understanding, according to a 2016 article by U archivist Rebecca Toov.
Polio cases ebbed throughout the fall, with only sporadic spikes in diagnoses and hospital admissions.
By mid-November, only a single 8-year-old girl occupied the once-crowded polio quarantine ward at St. Paul’s Ancker Hospital. Several hundred remained hospitalized in Minneapolis, however.
‘Happiest story of 1956’
Subsequent polio outbreaks in Minnesota in the early 1950s would sicken residents in greater numbers, but none would prove as deadly as the 1946 epidemic.
The 1955 introduction of the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk marked the beginning of the end for the disease’s reign of terror.
“To most parents of school-age children, the happiest story of 1956 was one that never made big, black headlines — the drop in polio cases in Minnesota,” Pioneer Press reporter Kathryn Boardman wrote a decade after the state’s deadliest outbreak.
“The 1956 polio story, unlike those of the horror summers of 1946, 1952 and 1953 when the daily reports of the mounting cases and deaths terrified everyone, was told in three and four paragraph stories with modest headlines.”