Unicef: Polio’s awful impact still being felt in New Zealand
Shirley Hazelwood spent much of her childhood in and out hospital.
Survivors of New Zealand's devastating polio epidemics spoke to UNICEF NZ about their experience and the ongoing importance of vaccinations for children.
SPECIAL REPORT: Shirley Hazlewood was just 14 months old when she got polio. She would spend the next fourteen years in hospital, allowed home only in the weekends. Her childhood was a daily struggle with polio, and she has spent her adult life dealing with the effects.
"It was really hard. I had callipers on both legs so I could stand. If my callipers broke, it doesn't matter where I was, that was where I stayed until somebody came and rescued me."
Shirley Hazlewood was just 14 months old when she got polio, and spent 14 years in and out of hospital.
When she was allowed home, her father still expected her to pull her weight on the family farm. Not easy, but perhaps, she says, that's where she developed her stubborn streak.
"I thank my Dad for that because he just pushed me to the limit. He says, 'You might be disabled, girl, but you've got a good head on you' and that's how I always think of that when I can't do something. Have a go. You don't give up before you don't try."
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Shirley Hazelwood looks at a picture of herself as a child growing up in rural Taranaki.
Shirley's childhood in and out of rural Taranaki hospitals was a reality for children up and down New Zealand through the first half of last century. Prior to the introduction of a vaccine in 1961, polio was commonplace, flaring up every year. Most people contracting the polio virus had few symptoms and so the disease was quickly spread. It was so contagious that nearly every person became infected, and those with the highest diseases rates were children and infants.
Over the decades it killed hundreds of New Zealanders, and left tens of thousands more crippled, injured, or paralysed.
In 1947 Barbara Williams was a young nurse at Stratford Hospital when a particularly bad epidemic swept the country. Schools were closed for six weeks, large gatherings frowned upon, and all families with a family member affected by polio quarantined for six weeks.
Barbara Williams was a young nurse when the polio epidemic swept through New Zealand.
"They had a ward full of little children… and they would be taken away from their families. The family was not allowed to visit them and all they knew were the people suddenly around them who had no faces because they were wearing masks, no hair because they had a covering on their head and a long white gown" she says.
"All they wanted was their mothers arms around them. And they cried. I will never forget those children crying."
She says that medical staff not only knew there was little they could do to assist affected children, but also that they were at risk of contracting the disease from the children they were caring for.
"We just had to hope that they would live, and not all of them did. We were probably versed in what we had to do and keep ourselves as well as possible," she says.
"One of the nurses did get polio in my hospital and died and that I remember well because she was in the iron lung, helping her to breathe. The noise of it was coming through the hospital so much that you could hear the thump, thump, thump. Then one day it didn't go and we knew we'd lost a friend."
Barbara Williams was a young nurse at Stratford Hospital when a bad epidemic swept the country in 1947.
Those children who survived often faced shunning, and isolation, says Doug Hutchinson, who caught the disease, along with his two brothers, when he was six years old.
"It was only spoken about in whispers. We were sort of shunned in case others caught polio off us."
"I do have flash backs every now and then. One of the flashbacks I still have a bit of a dream about and it's some little child voice saying 'stop crying, stop crying, no one can hear you,'" he says.
Barbara Williams at home with her great grandaughter.
"I do remember having the nurse pull back the top sheet so that I could see Mum and Dad waving at me through the glass window of the room."
Even when their parents were able to visit, they weren't necessarily able to enter the room out of fear of contracting the disease. That didn't stop some desperate parents from figuring out how to see thier children.
"One very vivid memory that does stick was seeing a man's hat being thrown onto the floor by my bed and then Dad coming to retrieve it, saying that it slipped out of his hand. He said "How are you getting on little man?" Later in life I found out that Dad had actually contracted polio as a child himself. Perhaps he wasn't as foolhardy as you might think."
Doug Hutchinson caught polio when he was six.
Today, polio is endemic in just three countries – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. But until it is eradicated, the potential for polio to spread remains, and the need for vaccination against polio remains.
Ongoing efforts by organisations such as Unicef, WHO, and Rotary mean there is a very real possibility that polio could soon be eradicated, the way smallpox was in 1980. Until then, however, no country can afford to become complacent.
For those who have lived through this disease, the idea that anyone could elect not to vaccinate their children against any devastating disease, such as polio, is horrifying.
"Don't give up on immunising children for goodness sake," says Shirley.
Doug Hutchinson caught the disease, along with his two brothers, when he was just six years old.
"There's so much going on out there. You've got whooping cough, you've got measles. You've got everything out there and if you don't immunise your children, they're going to get it twice as bad and you could end up losing your child by not immunising."
To help Unicef provide life-saving vaccinations for children around the world, please click here.
This article was supplied as part of Stuff's partnership with Unicef NZ. Unicef stands up for every child so they can have a childhood. Find out more at unicef.org.nz
- Stuff
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