Paul Alexander: ‘Man in the iron lung’ dies after living in tank for 70 years

Paul Alexander, of Dallas in Texas, US, was paralysed from the neck down after contracting the virus at the age of six in 1952.

According to a GoFundMe page previously set up to help pay for Mr Alexander’s care, he died on Monday.

Fundraising organiser Christopher Ulmer wrote: “Paul, you will be missed but always remembered. Thanks for sharing your story with us.”

Mr Alexander died after being rushed to hospital with Covid, according to reports.

At the age of six, he was taken to hospital after developing polio symptoms and woke up inside a mechanical lung. Mr Alexander, who was given the name “the man with the iron lung”, lived inside it for the rest of his life.

The iron lung acted as a diaphragm to help Alexander breathe after a doctor performed a tracheotomy on him to remove the congestion from his lungs following his polio infection.

Because of his polio he was unable to breathe for himself.

He was unable to move or talk inside the metal casing, and would often go unwashed because he was unable to communicate with the nurses looking after him.

His father placed a clear plastic stick, flat and about a foot long with a pen attached, which he uses to write and push buttons on devices such as mobile phones.

Alexander was one of many children placed inside iron lungs during an outbreak of polio in the US during the 1950s.

Later, he learned to breathe by himself and was able to spend short periods of time outside the iron lung and got into university, obtaining a law degree.

He also published his own memoir in April 2020.

“I knew if I was going to do anything with my life, it was going to have to be a mental thing,” he told The Guardian in 2020.

Polio is a serious infection that is now very rare in both the US and UK because of a vaccination programme. It is now only found in a few countries and the chance of getting it is very low.

Health officials declared a national incident after the polio virus was identified in sewage samples taken from London between February and May 2022, but no associated cases appeared to have been identified.

There have been no confirmed cases of paralysis due to polio caught in the UK since 1984.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, frequent epidemics saw polio become one of the most feared diseases in the world.

A major outbreak in New York City in 1916 killed more than 2,000 people, and the worst recorded US outbreak in 1952 killed over 3,000.

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