Field Notes #29: Splooting, polio in 2022, Kate Bowler's Blessing for a New School Year
This newsletter edition contains extremely cute animals
Hello, friends! We’re in that liminal space at the boundary of summer. The crickets are a wild symphony each evening. The temperatures are bouncing between 59 and 89. The last half of August feels swollen with mourning and anticipation: the closing of the sublime summer and the opening of a new school year, these two grand feelings folded into each day.
These week’s Field Notes — three interesting things I’ve run across lately in the health arena, which I consider a spacious, eclectic realm — is a silly new-to-me word describing one way animals stay cool, a history of polio and its 2022 update, and a blessing for the start of the new school year by the wondrous Kate Bowler. I hope you find something delightful or helpful to you.
1} Splooting
All bodies have to adjust to heat somehow. Animals apparently sploot. I love this new word — which refers to splaying out legs and arms to disperse body heat.
Lots of reporters wrote about splooting last week, including this nice summary from The Washington Post. The origins of the word are unclear, but in the Post article, Fiona McPherson, a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary, shares: “Etymologically, it may be a variant of splat, but I have also seen suggestions that it is a blend of splay and scoot.”
I’ve only done yoga a few times, but I wondered if this is also a yoga pose. My yoga friends, any idea? Does splooting have another name in the human world? It does look like a marvelous stretch. I might try it!
2} Polio in 2022
Not far from where I live in the Hudson Valley, a young man has diagnosed with polio. Now reports are saying that this version of the polio virus probably been circulating somewhere in the world since April and that there are far more cases than 1 in New York. Yes, polio in 2022.
“Polio was once considered one of the most feared diseases in the United States,” according to the CDC. “In the early 1950s, before polio vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year in the United States.” North America and South America were declared polio-free by the World Health Organization in 1994.
What a know of polio is pieced together from historical fragments: images of people in iron lungs, lines of children waiting to get the vaccine in a sugar cube, the relief of so many parents that a vaccine had been created to protect them. Polio is a very incomplete idea to me, so I went looking to understand it better. Why is it circulating now? Are children today still vaccinated against polio, if it was supposedly eradicted from America in 1994?
Yes, the polio vaccine is still given to infants and kids in the routine series of vaccines. (If you received the regular vaccination series as a kid, you were automatically vaccinated against polio, too.) You can find it on your children’s vaccination records listed as IPV, for “inactivated polio vaccine.” The oral version, which contains the live virus and abbreviated as OPV, is no longer used in the U.S., but other countries do use it still. That’s key, because the way the oral, live vaccine version works also causes the virus to be shed, which can infect unvaccinated people. That’s how experts think the man in New York got polio.
This MedPage Today essay, The Current Case of Polio Through a Historical Lens, by Dr. Amesh Adalja, explains a lot of this clearly — a really helpful read.
Once the polio virus is shed and caught by a person who is not immune, it can circulate among other people who have not been vaccinated. Vaccination rates fell over the pandemic. In Rockland County, New York, home of the one polio case, the percent of children under 2 years who had their 3-dose polio vaccinate dropped from 67% in July 2020 to 60% in August 2022. In at least 1 county zip code, the vaccination coverage is only at 37%. The virus is likely to keep moving around.
"Every person that this virus encounters in New York is not susceptible. The vast majority of them are protected. They're immune, so it goes into their intestinal tract, goes out, and doesn't bother the person who's been infected," explained William Schaffner, MD, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, in an interview with MedPage Today. "But this virus is out there circulating."
Most people do not have serious effects, but 1 in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis, according to the World Health Organization Fact Sheet on Polio. In 5-10% of the cases, breathing muscles become immobilized, which is fatal.
All people who have been vaccinated against polio are protected. If you aren’t sure if your child — or yourself — was vaccinated against polio, you can check your records and look for IPV. It’s not too late to get vaccinated now.
"The vast majority of people in this country are vaccinated. However, there are pockets of individuals who are not vaccinated, and those people should take it seriously," Dr. Amesh Adalja, MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an infectious disease, critical care, and emergency physician in Pittsburgh, told MedPage Today. "If you're one of those individuals [who] have not been vaccinated, this is a threat to you."
If you haven’t been vaccinated and are feeling unsure about the polio vaccine, please talk to your doctor. You can make a list of every question you have and bring the list, so you can get all your questions answered. (I’m not a doctor. None of this is medical guidance. Ask your doctor. Ask your doctor!)
3} Blessing for the New School Year from Kate Bowler
The school year is around the corner, and we have been feeling the full rainbow of emotions in our house. I was grateful to run across Kate Bowler’s Blessing for the Start of a New School Year. I thought you might love it, too.
The year is tilting toward the start of school again,
but truth be told, we’re not ready.
We’re still hanging on to summer, to the promise it held
for long-awaited connections and celebrations,
for refreshment for our bodies and souls
in water and sky and color and sunlight,
and all those little moments given to us
where we could linger just a little longer.
Now that it’s almost over, we don’t want to let it go.
The beauty. The freedom. All that was life-giving.
God, could you help us stretch it, extend it,
and maybe even blend it
into this coming school year?
Parents, students, teachers, all,
May your newly-structured days breathe with creativity,
your new duties be infused with delight.
As you write on those fresh new calendars
May you trust that your plans are a lot like magic ink.
Much may seem to disappear into obscurity,
but whatever is done in love will remain.
— Kate Bowler
“But whatever is done in love will remain.”
Thank you, Kate. Learn more about Kate and her books and her work here.
I hope you have a lovely weekend ahead, and all students, parents, and teachers have a spectacular school year ahead, too.
To our journeys,
Brianne