Football star’s lasting legacy

Scunthorpe born Jeff Hall made 227 appearances for Birmingham City

Polio is almost a forgotten illness.

A highly infectious virus, it attacks the brain and spinal cord and can cause paralysis, muscle wastage and death.

Now wiped out from most of the world through vaccination; the disease claimed hundreds of lives and caused severe disability to thousands more.

Major outbreaks took place throughout the first-half of the 20th Century. An effective vaccine was developed in the 1950s, but uptake in the UK was low.

It took the death of a young, fit, football star to change the public's mind.

Jeff Hall was born in Scunthorpe in 1929. He moved to Keighley in West Yorkshire where he became a renowned young footballer

He signed up as a professional with Birmingham City and made over 227 appearances for the club.

A gifted full-back, he helped the Blues gain a place in the First Division and played in the 1956 FA Cup Final.

Hall received an England call-up and won 17 caps for the national side.

The player is commemorated with a clock at Birmingham City’s stadium.

He became ill with polio after an away match, and died in a Birmingham hospital on 4 April 1959: aged just 29.

Immediately after his death demand for the newly introduced vaccine rocketed. People queued up across the country and extra doses had to be imported from the USA.

The result was that polio was eradicated from the UK. An average summer polio outbreak would produce 5000-7000 cases. Routine immunisation in childhood means that the last case in the UK was in 1984.

Ironically, consigning Polio and other diseases to the history books may be leading some people to forgo vaccination, leading to a return of outbreaks of serious illnesses.

This situation is worrying public health officials according to Dr Terry Mathews , Consultant in Communicable Diseases Control for the North Yorkshire and Humber Health Protection Unit:

"I think inevitably when you cease to see large numbers of people getting serious illnesses some complacency does creep in. But I think we have to think back that certainly during my lifetime we have seen serious outbreak of infectious diseases.

I think back to when a child in my class actually had polio when I was at primary school. So some of the diseases have been around relatively recently.

We have seen with lower uptake of the MMR vaccine following adverse publicity over the last decade. That we've so far have failed to get the uptake back to where it needs to be to stop cases and outbreaks of measles occurring."

Images courtesy of Birmingham City FC