Bygones: Vital polio vaccinations rolled out across town
We often look back and think of the "good old days".
But unfortunately some of those so called "good old days" were pretty dire – as the sufferers and survivors from infantile paralysis – the pre-war term for polio – will tell you.
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GENTLY DOES IT: Ladies first ... seven-year-old Marilyn Meadows, the first Grimsby child to be given an injection of the new polio vaccine at Macaulay Primary Junior School in 1956.
In the late 1940s and 1950s some 30,000 people across the UK were struck down with the disease.
There are several forms of polio, or poliomyelitis.
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It is an infectious disease caused by one of three viruses. After initial 'flu like symptoms, the virus can attack the spinal cord, causing muscle paralysis, which can affect any part of the body.
The virus was identified in 1953, and the first vaccinations arrived in the town in 1956.
The first recipient of the vaccine, on May 10, was Marilyn Meadows, at Macaulay Street School, Grimsby.
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