Corrigan: "It is not true, however, that the polio vaccine or any other vaccine was ever tested on millions of people before it was approved." The clinical study for Salk's vaccine alone had 440,000 children given the vaccine, 210,000 given a placebo, and 1.2 million in the control group. Koprowski's large-scale field trials involved over 7 million children in poland. If you count the Soviet Union's immunization campaign, whose results they studied and which helped confirm the validity of it to the rest of the world, Sabin's vaccine's "trials" involved tens of millions. http://www.polio.info/polio-eradication/front/templates/index.jsp?siteCode=POLIO&codeRubrique=34&lang=EN Yet, Salk's was but one vaccine. What I said was indeed accurate. There were millions involved in the clinical trials of polio vaccines. You're right that vaccines *usually* don't have such a large test size, but polio was an exception. "As far as the viral cause of polio, well, yes, but what triggers the paralysis? Polio was endemic before the introduction of the vaccine. Everyone was infected by early childhood. And yet poliomyelitis was rare before the modern age." That's because the virus is transmitted through the fecal-oral route -- with a twist. Like how chicken pox is less virulent the younger you are infected, the same is true with polio. The oldest clear reference to poliomyelitis is in a 3,000 year old Egyptian stele. Historically, due to poor sanitation (which led to outbreaks of many diseases, like cholera), almost every infant would be exposed with poliovirus. If it was symptomatic, they simply died, without the cause ever being revealed. If it wasn't symptomatic, they were immune for the rest of their life. However when, to combat various other plagues, modern sanitation began to be used (so fecal waste wasn't dumped into the same water that people would drink), people weren't exposed to polio as infants. When they were exposed at older ages, then the problems arose. Those with the best health situations tended to be struck the worst; it became a disease of the affluent. Which is probably why so much money was poured into curing it, unlike, say, malaria (which still kills millions). :P There's absolutely no evidence that the rate of poliomyelitis compared to the rate of poliovirus infection in adults has ever changed significantly. As for the pesticide hypothesis, that particularly doesn't stand up to scrutiny. DDT wasn't even invented until '39, but the US had huge polio outbreaks before then. Remember FDR? :) H.L. Menken wrote about polio outbreaks happening virtually every summer in Baltimore in the late 1800s. It's illogical, too. Poliovirus progressing into poliomyelitis involves how readily the virus passes the brain-blood barrier. While chemicals that pass the brain-blood barrier are few, even fewer are the chemicals which alter how well *other* things pass through the barrier.

MORE rain, I can't believe 3 weeks later and it's just been more of the same! Had over 1" the other night, probably have that today since it is pouring (though not overflowing the gutters since DH cleaned them out after water started pooling under the porch and coming into the basement). Planted a couple dozen pepper plants on Friday, still haven't put out tomatoes and the rest of the peppers (put them back in garage this AM, we've been going in and out so much I don't know if they know they're hardened off LOL). Tomato trellis is all up and I started digging for squash bed but yesterday the tomato trenches were wet on the lower end (a couple really wet) and the squash bed looked like a hog wallow. I did add some pebbles to the bottom of 1 trench, dug out farther for drainage, and added some partially-composted wood chips and more top soil to all the trenches. We'll see how it looks Monday when the rain stops. I don't know if I'm even going to plant squash this year - though I finally started 6 cukes inside the other day. I bought 2 rain barrels - didn't hook them up, but just left the tops off this AM - we'll see how much they collect in 48 hrs! Need to get the sauerkraut washed out of them. I'm just hoping I can plant out 60 tomatoes and about 30 peppers b/t Monday and Thurs - then the rains come again! With the drought and the floods in the South, and all this rain in the Northeast, is anybody going to be able to grow any crops this year? CA doing OK? How's FL? Are we all going to have to live off canned goods for the next year?

Naturenut, I'd heard that River Road was bad in Uhlerstown at 7 am this morning, and it's probably gotten much worse by now. My mother is being evacuated right now, in Ewing NJ. Luckily my brother is there to help (although he sounded pretty panicked on the phone). I was up at 4:41 am this morning clearing ditches around the garage and barn, and couldn't believe how hard the rain was coming down. I was still outside when the storm "broke" and the weather started to improve, and it was an amazingly distinct moment. Suddenly the rain lessened, the pre-dawn sky brightened, and a bird started singing. It seemed to happen in about 10 seconds.

When we have a county burn ban, our commissioners usually lift it once our KBDI drops below 600. I don't know that the OFS uses that same criteria when making recommendations to Gov. Fallin, but I have been expecting them to lift the ban for some counties for a couple of weeks now, so the move didn't surprise me. We are having small fires in our county, but nothing that has gotten the least bit rowdy or out-of-control lately, so I think that they could lift even our burn ban (our KBDI is 661 this morning) right now (which they did not), and we wouldn't have serious wildfire trouble at this point in time. The trouble will come after you have a few frosts and killing freezes if it is still very dry and then you have all that dry, standing vegetation which will burn easily whether it is dead annual vegetation or dormant perennial vegetation. We need to have a really wet fall and winter so that the winter fire season isn't bad. Nothing about our soil is in good shape, Larry, except where I've been watering in the veggie garden and around the fruit trees. We're starting to see cracks in the soil near the house where we haven't had them before, so today and tomorrow I'm going to try to water long and hard in those areas to try and get those cracks to close back up. I'll probably have to water a while, let it soak in, then water again, etc. You know how hard it is to get clay to absorb water when it is rock-hard. Carol, I imagine it will be a real relief to everyone to be able to burn that piled up wood from the big storm that hit your area. As long as it is sitting there, it is such a fire hazard. I'd rather be able to burn that stuff deliberately and have it under control than to have a raging wildfire burn through the area and get it. Some of the Texas counties have been lifting their burn bans here and there along the river. One county made the announcement lifting their burn ban, then said that people should NOT go out and burn brush or do prescribed burning of land for brush removal because it still was too dry to burn. That made me wonder why they lifted the burn ban if they were going to stand there and say "but don't do any burning". That whole thing made no sense. Dawn