FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PBS Documentary Filmed at

Public Health Museum

PBS American Experience, "The Polio Crusade"

to Air February 2, 2009 

October 21, 2008

The Public Health Museum of Massachusetts hosted Sarah Colt Productions out of Boston to shoot scenes for a new Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary for the American Experience Series.  “The Polio Crusade” will premiere locally on WGBH 2 on Monday, February 2, 2009.  The film combines emotional stories of polio’s ravaging effects with the drama of the scientific race to find a cure.  The one-hour film documents the life of a young man, who at the age of 13, was diagnosed with polio and placed in an iron lung.  

The Public Health Museum provided use of the iron lung and space on its first floor where the Colt production crew set the stage for a large open hospital room with 1950's décor and recreated life from the young boy’s perspective.  Filming was done on Saturday, October 18, at the Public Health Museum located at Tewksbury Hospital, 365 East Street in Tewksbury. 

Dr. Al DeMaria, Director, Bureau of Communicable Disease Control Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Acting President of the Public Health Museum Board of Directors, commented on the filming.  "It's wonderful to have this PBS documentary use the Public Health Museum's unique collection and setting for its examination of polio’s impact.  Some of us in Public Health remember the fear and anxiety and the devastating effects polio had on the general public.  The height of the epidemic was in 1952 before the vaccination was developed by Jonas Salk and became available on a wide basis in 1955.  Today we remember polio only from a distance and do not get the full impact it had directly and indirectly on everyone who experienced and feared it.  If there were no vaccines against polio and it occurred as it did in the early 1950s, with the population growth of the last 55 years, we would be having 100 cases of paralytic polio each and every day in the United States now.  You can see how significant the discovery of this vaccine really was."  

Local resident, Helen Blaschke, RN, played the role of the nurse who cared for the young polio stricken boy.  Reminiscing about her experiences as a child in the mid 1950s during the height of the polio epidemic, Helen says, “I remember the fear and anxiety.  No one knew how you could get polio, so parents were very protective of us.  I remember my dad refusing to take us swimming at the local beach.  No matter how much we begged, he would not budge.  I also remember walking into the cafeteria of the old McFarland School in Chelmsford to what seemed to me to be a sea of screaming kids, infants to teens, waiting for their immunization shots.  Looking back on this my parents must have felt very much the way my generation felt when the AIDS epidemic started.  We didn't know how people got it or how it was passed on to others.  We just knew many people were getting it and dying from it,” she said.   

 Helen currently works at Lowell General Hospital in their Emergency Department.  Prior to that, she worked at Saint Joseph’s Hospital for many years.  Lowell school children may remember her as their nurse at the Morey School where she worked for 12 years or as the Medical Coordinator for the NYSP Program at UMass Lowell.