Survivors of polio wary of facility's future

By Maggie Large
The Macon Telegraph
January 9, 2003

The polio-therapy center that once treated Franklin Roosevelt and now helps dozens of Middle Georgians is scrambling to keep up its services.

The Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation treats polio survivors with post-polio syndrome, a collection of symptoms that affects anywhere from 25 percent to 50 percent of polio survivors.

Roosevelt was treated there from the 1920s until his death in 1945 and brought the institute to international prominence. Now, patients with conditions ranging from brain and spinal cord injuries to stroke, amputations and polio seek care at Warm Springs.

But with the Dec. 15 death of polio specialist Dr. Anne Gawne and the retirement of Dr. James Knowles last fall, patients have not known where to turn. The institute has other physical medicine and rehabilitation doctors on staff, but none with specialized polio training, spokesman Martin Harmon said.

Elizabeth Cook, a polio survivor in Macon, Ga., said she had received a letter and a phone call from Warm Springs this month telling her to wait before making another appointment.

"I went over there in June and had a complete evaluation with Dr. Gawne. She had told me to come back in January, but then I got a call that she had died," Cook said.

Ella Haynes-Hooks, a Macon, Ga., polio survivor and Macon Telegraph employee, said she had first been to the institute in the 1950s as a child. When post-polio syndrome started to affect her in the mid-1980s, Haynes-Hooks headed back to Warm Springs. She was disappointed that a polio specialist has been unavailable. "It'd be (unfortunate) to phase that out, what with FDR finding the place and everything," Haynes-Hooks said.

Harmon said the institute is seeking a polio specialist to replace Gawne and that Knowles would come out of retirement to treat people in the interim. For now, the program is "in transition."

Statistics from the National Institute of Health estimate that there are about 650,000 polio survivors in the United States at risk for post-polio syndrome. Harmon said several hundred polio survivors, many of them Middle Georgians, sought treatment at the institute annually.

Warm Springs is one of three major centers in Georgia that treats post-polio syndrome intensively, Harmon said. The Shepherd Center in Atlanta and Walton Rehabilitation Hospital in Augusta also take these patients.

Allan Whitehead, a manager with the state Division of Rehabilitation Services in Dallas, said his office often referred polio survivors to Warm Springs for treatment.

"We send people there because there's no place else like it in Georgia," Whitehead said.

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Survivors of polio wary of facility's future

Survivors of polio wary of facility's future

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