When Miki Boleen sees new parents in her doctor’s office, she often asks if they’ve immunized their child against polio — a disease that immobilized her.
Her desire is not to frighten, but with vaccination rates declining in babies and toddlers due to missed routine immunizations at the start of the pandemic, she hopes her story will help others stay healthy. Boleen, 83, suggests people talk to their doctor — and with others who’ve had infectious diseases that can be prevented with vaccines.
Her message is simple: Why not consider immunization and prevent an avoidable serious illness?
“Please, please get your children immunized,” the Abbotsford, B.C., resident said in a conversation with Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art. “You don’t want them ending up like me.”
These conversations are happening as public health experts warn that polio could resurface, following spread in the U.S. and the U.K. In New York state this summer, a young man suffered paralysis after a polio infection, the first case in the U.S. in nearly a decade.
This week, doctors and scientists pointed to those developments as well as outbreaks in Malawi and Mozambique and how the unprecedented floods in Pakistan could disrupt polio immunization in issuing an urgent call to achieve a polio-free world.
By the 1990s, mass immunization campaigns that began in Canada in 1955 largely eradicated polio here. Before then, thousands of children were infected.
