Livingston Manor

To the editor:

As an older fellow, able to look back on many decades of matters of health care, I consider myself to be very lucky. I have ‘good genes’, have tried to maintain rather constant weight and a good diet. In spite of all these things, like so many others, I have had my share of medical tests, exams, X rays, minor surgeries and routine probing and prodding and for all of that I am extremely fortunate to have had access to caring and well trained medical personnel. I have never taken that for granted.

My first memory of medical good luck came in 1954 (as a sophomore in high school) when the Polio Vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk. I got the ‘shot’ on an afternoon while mowing the lawn of the only doctor we had in our rural town in Western NY. The doctor’s wife (also his nurse) gave me the ‘shot’ and within weeks, the entire student body of our school was inoculated! In those days every parent’s fear was that their son/daughter might ‘get polio’- a dreaded disease!)

At the time, because of the ugliness of polio, there was no vaccine drama, no political haggling, no outward cry by skeptics – simply a social and collective sigh of relief. The result: Polio was irradicated in the US!

Currently, (in the last 7 weeks) we seem to be plagued with another problem for which there is no vaccine?!? There is an anti-intellectual, anti-medical research and anti many things that American society has benefited from both socially and medically (though it’s hard to really separate them at times).

Just as polio was conquered so, also, might cancer and ALS be just another clinical experiment away! Why (?) would any person who claims to have ‘saved by God’ not want this to happen?

The White House phone number is 1 (202)456-1414.