2024-03-15 15:15:49
15 mars 2024
On March 11, Paul Alexander died following living for more than 70 years in what is known as an “iron lung.” And this following contracting poliomyelitis at the age of 6. What is this device that saved many lives in the middle of the 20th century?
Poliomyelitis (or polio) is a potentially fatal infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. The latter invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis within a few hours. The first symptoms are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, neck stiffness and pain in the limbs. One in 200 infections results in irreversible paralysis, and 5 to 10% of people with paralytic poliomyelitis die from paralysis of the respiratory muscles.
Although there are today 2 vaccines developed in the 1950s that can protect a child for life and therefore provide a glimpse of the possibility of eradicating the disease, this has not always been the case. And scientists have sought to make up for polio victims’ inability to breathe.
Imitate breathing
In 1931 in the United States, John Haven Emerson modernized an “iron lung” created in 1928. This device – a box of sorts – made it possible to recreate a microenvironment which imitated the way in which the muscles of the chest and the diaphragm do moving air in and out of the lungs. The patient lies on his back. The head sits on a support outside the machine with a rubber collar around the neck to provide the seal needed to maintain the pressurized environment. As the pressure increases in the reservoir, air is pushed out of the patient’s lungs through the mouth, and as the pressure decreases in the reservoir, air is drawn into the patient’s lungs.
« Most patients only used their iron lung for a few weeks or months, depending on the severity of the polio attack, but those who left their chest muscles permanently paralyzed from the disease were confined All their life », We can read on the Ohio State University website. Like Paul Alexander, this American who contracted polio in 1952 at the age of 6 and was “confined” until his death a few days ago. “ In 1959, 1,200 people used iron lungs in the United States, but by 2017 there were only three. » And for good reason, the virtual eradication of polio with the development of Jonas Salk’s vaccine in 1952, the use of iron lungs has become largely obsolete.
The Ohio State University nevertheless specifies that with “ the global shortage of modern ventilators needed for patients with severe Covid-19, prototypes of new, easily producible versions of the iron lung have been developed. »
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