Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma (abcnews.com)

Her optimism and creativity to overcome the disability and live her life is powerfully inspirational.

I wish I could apply that optimism to my perception of a societal shift away from disability accomodations and the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy... Enabling parents to foster unvaccinated children is a guarantee that we'll get a resurgence of this type of disease.

I recommend everyone educate themselves on our immune system: the book "Immune" (ISBN: 1529360684) introduces the vast complexity in a very approachable manner. Also the podcasts through MicrobeTV by Vincent Racaniello are excellent.

Drinking a beer for her, she went to the high school very close by. I'm far too young to remember polio but still remember my grandparents talking about it. They had died of Covid-19 before her.

Something to remember by her is that the determination to live is something that keeps us going.

Perhaps we'll be great again soon.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-how-quickly...

its crazy that humankind can effectively end disease

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And a good day to you, sir!

Her self-created obituary, if anyone’s curious: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/shawnee-ok/martha...

Wild bad luck. Polio and despite vaccination she got Covid not once but twice and died of sequelei! And recently married. That is like lightening striking, again and again and again and again.

I often think about how nearly everyone in my parent's generation knew someone with polio, but I know nobody from my generation in the world who had polio

I'm reminded of the contributions of Naomi Wu. https://archive.org/details/youtube-4VKZTmTP7oY

Died of Long Covid. Been seeing a growing number of deaths in the Long Covid communities. There are >400 million people with Long Covid and growing in the world, if its lethal its going to be a lot of dead in the coming years.

let me know in a few years what the last polio patient is doing.