1954:

With Polio Season quickly approaching, there are renewed calls for better sanitation by the residents of South Vancouver, who, despite repeated appeals over the previous forty years, still live without even a basic sewer system.

“South Van Septic Tanks ‘Polio Threat’” declares the Vancouver News-Herald. “Dealy polio germs lurk in open Vancouver ditches into which septic tank sewage seeps during poliomyletis outbreaks[...] Fifty of the 120 polio cases reported in Vancouver proper last year occurred in South Vancouver, by far the highest incidence for any one area of the city. Medical men say it would be wrong to assume this is a result of South Vancouver having the highest percentage of septic tanks[...] but they unhesitatingly point out that the presence in the city of large numbers of septic tanks which discharge sewage unabsorbed sewage into open ditches is a decided health menace.”

“Our taxes are high, but we don’t mind as long as we get the services they’re supposed to pay for,” says Ray Oates of South Vancouver. “We want sewers before we want an auditorium.”

The article is accompanied by a photograph of a young girl playing in a contaminated ditch.

Image: Individual in an iron lung at VGH, circa 1940s. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.