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New Fears Of Smallpox Stir
Haunting Memories Of 1947
By Robyn Suriano
Sentinel Staff Writer
10-29-1

ALTAMONTE SPRINGS - The man had died the day before, while nursing student Florence Adler helplessly tried to make him comfortable. She could not have known, but the smallpox patient must have felt as if his skin was on fire.
 
The man, one of America's last cases of smallpox, never knew what he had. Even Adler did not learn until she read the newspaper the next day. She had not seen smallpox before his case in 1947, and she hopes never to see it again.
 
"It was unheard of in the U.S. by that time," said Adler, of Altamonte Springs, who was training back then at the Willard Parker Hospital for Communicable Diseases in New York City. "It was something we read about in books and saw in the movies, but who would ever expect to see it here?"
 
Adler, who was 22 in 1947, stood in line for hours that day waiting to get a booster shot of smallpox vaccination. In barely a month, about 6 million New Yorkers were vaccinated as fear of the highly contagious disease known as "the scourge" ricocheted through the city.
 
Adler, now 76, expected to leave smallpox in her memory, but she thinks about the disease more since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the ongoing anthrax problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says smallpox could be a potentially devastating tool of bioterrorists.
 
Few Americans have first-hand experience with the disease. The last U.S. case was documented in 1949, according to the CDC, although the disease remained a serious problem in other parts of the world for decades more.
 
The World Health Organization launched an international vaccination program for smallpox in 1967 and managed to track down the last known case on the planet in Somalia in 1977.
 
Adler's patient had come into the hospital while she was helping with admissions. She questioned him, filled out his paperwork and was assigned with another student to care for him exclusively.
 
The doctors suspected that the man, who had just returned from Mexico, had a bad case of chickenpox. It made sense at first. The childhood illness usually causes serious disease in adults, and what Adler saw was heartbreaking.
 
The sores covering his skin were already white pustules when the man arrived at the hospital. Adler could not find any clear skin to give him shots of sedatives. His eyes were bright red, glowing like headlights. Though he was walking and talking at first, the man's condition quickly degenerated. He died a day and a half after being admitted.
 
"It was such a virulent, fast disease, and he was in such pain. It went like wildfire," Adler said. "There were two of us assigned to care for him solely, he was that sick, and we did everything possible to make him comfortable, but it was useless."
 
When doctors determined the true source of his illness, Adler was not particularly concerned for herself. She had been vaccinated once before, and she felt even more secure with her second inoculation.
 
"Somehow, I wasn't worried about dying," Adler said. "At 22, nobody thinks about that."
 
Though the victim had been kept in a room by himself, he was not sufficiently isolated to prevent spreading the smallpox virus. The viral rash always lines a patient's throat, filling his or her saliva with the disease.
 
Every cough or exhale potentially can release the virus into the air as tiny water droplets, which others may breathe in. Alder remembers that at least 20 other patients at Willard Parker Hospital became ill with smallpox.
 
She also recalls that patients two miles away at Bellevue Hospital became ill, assumedly after the virus was carried from one building to the other via doctors, nurses or shared cleaning staff.
 
Official accounts of the New York cases offer various statistics about the outbreak. But at least one other patient -- in addition to the original victim -- died.
 
Adler, who worked as a public health nurse before leaving the field to raise a family, had gone into nursing after she broke her leg at 18 and was impressed by the care she received in another New York hospital.
 
Even if she had known the man had smallpox, she still would have been at his bedside, Adler said.
 
"As a nurse, you don't go and leave a patient hanging," Adler said. "I would have done my job."
 
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