Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

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The Polio Vaccine Factor

Indeed there is crying need for something better than the current SOC [standard of care] in PD and Rett's...and advocacy groups ready to press for rapid approvals in both of those indications!

As I mentioned, there was only one new, revolutionizing treatment that was universally and instantly accepted by the medical profession. Virtually everything else, from the blood-circulating function of the heart, to the multiple-disease pathogenic role of microbes, took years or decades to be accepted. How many postings here so authoritatively warn us that Anavex 2-73 will take years’ more of testing and clinical trials to make it to a pharmacy shelf? Maybe sometime toward the end of the decade?

That was not the question, however, when I was in the second grade. We already had a couple of kids who were in wheel chairs, “hooked-up” to all sorts of things attached to their bodies. They had poliomyelitis. Our mothers warned us not to play with any kid who sneezed or seemed sick in any way. “Stay away from those kids. You’ll get polio, and die.”

After the war, tens of thousands of mothers of we baby-boomers across the country collaborated in the March of Dimes campaign to fund and promote research for a vaccine. Jonas Salk and his team perfected one, and by the social and political pressure of “concerned mothers,” the vaccine was brought rapidly to the upper arms of vulnerable school kids around the country. Faster than any other new medical procedure or treatment to date. Astounding speed of implementation.

And I remember it with particular interest. A busload of us from Hayes Elementary were bussed across town to Stamm Elementary, which had a large gymnasium floor. Lined up, alphabetically, we were dutifully led into the gymnasium, behind a dozen other lines of kids moving slowly toward some seated nurses (white-capped, in those days). There was a smell of steam (or something), emanations from trays of sterilized glass syringes); and ominously, intermittent yelps of pain. “Ouch! That hurt!”

Dozens of kids were being injected with the brand-new Salk vaccine. It hurt at bit, but even we little second-graders knew, as our mothers and teachers told us, the pain was worth enduring. Some of our friends already had contracted polio.

To this day, I remember Barbie. She was right in front of me. She told me she’d, “be brave.” She was. The nurse picked up another syringe and gave Barbie her shot. She turned her head, and merely winced. Then, my turn. I watched. “Ouch.” But I was a boy. I could take it, and did.

Then, a few steps past the inoculation table, I looked at Barbie’s arm. The needle had come loose from the syringe when it was pulled out. The needle was still stuck in her arm. She turned and saw it, and screamed. A nurse’s aide came over, plucked the needle, and tried to calm Barbie, who was now feinted on the floor.

For all of that, six decades later, neither Barbie nor I have suffered with polio. It was the March of Dimes mothers who made this all happen, faster than anyone else imagined or perceived possible.

Could such a thing happen in Australia? How will the families and care givers of hundreds of thousands of Alzheimer’s patients react to increasing anecdotal accounts of, “Mom’s so much better now that she’s taking that little pink pill. She sleeps every night now, too!”?

Might social action, fulminating rather rapidly in political pressure, prompt rapid implementation of Anavex 2-73 in Australia, quite in the manner of the March of Dimes mothers and the Salk polio vaccine in the early 1950s?

By no means, not out of the question.