About fifty-five years ago this week, a small epidemic of poliomyelitis occurred in and around Norwich, UK. As I heard it later, the physicians involved did a perfunctory investigation and could find no obvious connection between the cases, although there was talk of a bus vehicle being a possible common factor.
The polio virus is one of the most primitive lifeforms on the planet, being little more than a few molecules in an organised form. It is spread by ingestion of microscopic contaminations of fecal matter from carriers of the virus, many of whom will be asymptomatic. In places where it's endemic, it tends to be present in untreated sewage, contaminated water supplies and sometimes on surfaces infected by carriers who have not washed their hands after using the toilet.
I have no idea of how I came into contact with this virus, but some time ago, I fictionalised my subsequent experience as a short story now republished on my POPPYCOCK blog. Some of my regular readers will have seen it before in a different forum and it also appeared in a local creative writing anthology sometime towards the end of the last century - Wow! Saying it like that does make me feel old. 
