Patrick Cockburn is currently Middle East correspondent for the Independent and worked previously for the Financial Times. He is the author of various books including, Behind Enemy Lines, The Rise of Islamic State, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, The Occupation, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn) and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry’s Demons, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009, the Foreign Commentator of the Year in 2013, and the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in 2020.

Epidemics

I was unlucky in catching polio in Cork in Ireland in 1956 as this was one of the last polio epidemics ever in Western Europe and the US. Dr Jonas Salk had discovered a vaccine that had been successfully tested the previous year and, at the time I fell ill, mass inoculation was being rolled out for the first time to stop the spread of the virus in Chicago. Across the city, health workers took over vacant shops, the forecourts of gas stations, the backs of trucks, parks and street corners to vaccinate people. The number of new infections declined as herd immunity was established, marking a turning point in the effort to stop epidemic polio. The success of this decades-long campaign was one of the greatest American achievements in the twentieth century.

Not that it did me any good at the time as I was admitted to St Finbarr’s fever hospital in Cork city on 30 September. When I was released three months later, I was at first confined to bed or was in a wheelchair and learned to walk again with metal calipers on my legs and wearing a plastic waistcoat to keep my back straight. Though my mobility improved markedly over the years, I could not run and have always walked with a severe limp. I was conscious of my disabilities, but I never thought much about why this had happened to me or about the epidemic in general. I could not have said with any certainty – and this self-inflicted ignorance was to continue until I was well into middle age – in what year it had taken place or whether it was caused by a virus or by bacteria. I sensed that thinking about this, picking at the emotional scar tissue, was not going to help me. Only in the late 1990s, when I was in Iraq as a journalist talking to doctors and patients in ill-equipped hospitals hit by UN sanctions, did I start to feel it strange that I knew more about sickness in Baghdad than I did about polio in Cork, when it had been me lying in a hospital bed.

I started reading about polio, a disease that has probably been around for thousands of years. There is an ancient Egyptian sculpture of a man with a wasted leg, looking very much like my own. Walter Scott was made lame by it as a child. But these were individual cases and it was not until the first half of the 20th century that polio epidemics began to sweep through cities. Before then most people contracted the virus in infancy, when their mother’s antibodies helped them to gain immunity. Long before the Covid-19 pandemic made the phrase ‘herd immunity’ infamous, the pool of people who had polio without knowing it was large enough to prevent pandemics. It was modernity that gave the polio virus its chance: as 19th-century cities acquired clean water supplies and efficient drainage systems, babies were no longer contracting the virus in large enough numbers to provide protection. When collective immunity faltered, epidemics would surge periodically through cities like New York, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Chicago. Devastating though these outbreaks were, they seldom occurred at the same time in different places because vulnerability to the virus would vary.

I was surprised that nobody had written a history of the Cork epidemic which had paralysed part of Ireland for the best part of a year. It lived on in popular memory as a terrifying event and there were plenty of victims still alive since they were crippled as small children. Nevertheless, the epidemic had never been the subject of a book or a serious academic study. I asked surviving doctors from that period, who were far older and therefore less numerous than their patients, why this was the case. They said they believed that people in Cork had been so frightened of the disease that they wanted to forget about it once vaccination had removed the danger. Polio had always carried an extra charge of terror compared to other diseases because its victims, whom it crippled or killed, were young children. As I read up government documents and newspapers about the epidemic, I came to understand that a further reason for the silence was that many Irish people were ashamed of what had happened, mistakenly imagining that the epidemic was caused by Irish underdevelopment and this was a symptom of the failure of independent Ireland to successfully modernise. I embarked on interviewing any medical staff and polio survivors I could find for a long article on myself and the epidemic published in 1998. I planned to write a book on the subject, but this was delayed by the post 9/11 wars when I was to spend much of my time reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn is currently Middle East correspondent for the Independent and worked previously for the Financial Times. He is the author of various books including, Behind Enemy Lines, The Rise of Islamic State, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, The Occupation, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn) and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry’s Demons, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009, the Foreign Commentator of the Year in 2013, and the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in 2020.

Epidemics

I was unlucky in catching polio in Cork in Ireland in 1956 as this was one of the last polio epidemics ever in Western Europe and the US. Dr Jonas Salk had discovered a vaccine that had been successfully tested the previous year and, at the time I fell ill, mass inoculation was being rolled out for the first time to stop the spread of the virus in Chicago. Across the city, health workers took over vacant shops, the forecourts of gas stations, the backs of trucks, parks and street corners to vaccinate people. The number of new infections declined as herd immunity was established, marking a turning point in the effort to stop epidemic polio. The success of this decades-long campaign was one of the greatest American achievements in the twentieth century.

Not that it did me any good at the time as I was admitted to St Finbarr’s fever hospital in Cork city on 30 September. When I was released three months later, I was at first confined to bed or was in a wheelchair and learned to walk again with metal calipers on my legs and wearing a plastic waistcoat to keep my back straight. Though my mobility improved markedly over the years, I could not run and have always walked with a severe limp. I was conscious of my disabilities, but I never thought much about why this had happened to me or about the epidemic in general. I could not have said with any certainty – and this self-inflicted ignorance was to continue until I was well into middle age – in what year it had taken place or whether it was caused by a virus or by bacteria. I sensed that thinking about this, picking at the emotional scar tissue, was not going to help me. Only in the late 1990s, when I was in Iraq as a journalist talking to doctors and patients in ill-equipped hospitals hit by UN sanctions, did I start to feel it strange that I knew more about sickness in Baghdad than I did about polio in Cork, when it had been me lying in a hospital bed.

I started reading about polio, a disease that has probably been around for thousands of years. There is an ancient Egyptian sculpture of a man with a wasted leg, looking very much like my own. Walter Scott was made lame by it as a child. But these were individual cases and it was not until the first half of the 20th century that polio epidemics began to sweep through cities. Before then most people contracted the virus in infancy, when their mother’s antibodies helped them to gain immunity. Long before the Covid-19 pandemic made the phrase ‘herd immunity’ infamous, the pool of people who had polio without knowing it was large enough to prevent pandemics. It was modernity that gave the polio virus its chance: as 19th-century cities acquired clean water supplies and efficient drainage systems, babies were no longer contracting the virus in large enough numbers to provide protection. When collective immunity faltered, epidemics would surge periodically through cities like New York, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Chicago. Devastating though these outbreaks were, they seldom occurred at the same time in different places because vulnerability to the virus would vary.

I was surprised that nobody had written a history of the Cork epidemic which had paralysed part of Ireland for the best part of a year. It lived on in popular memory as a terrifying event and there were plenty of victims still alive since they were crippled as small children. Nevertheless, the epidemic had never been the subject of a book or a serious academic study. I asked surviving doctors from that period, who were far older and therefore less numerous than their patients, why this was the case. They said they believed that people in Cork had been so frightened of the disease that they wanted to forget about it once vaccination had removed the danger. Polio had always carried an extra charge of terror compared to other diseases because its victims, whom it crippled or killed, were young children. As I read up government documents and newspapers about the epidemic, I came to understand that a further reason for the silence was that many Irish people were ashamed of what had happened, mistakenly imagining that the epidemic was caused by Irish underdevelopment and this was a symptom of the failure of independent Ireland to successfully modernise. I embarked on interviewing any medical staff and polio survivors I could find for a long article on myself and the epidemic published in 1998. I planned to write a book on the subject, but this was delayed by the post 9/11 wars when I was to spend much of my time reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq.