Dr. Dennis D. Embry

More children and adults are permanent sick or die from mental, emotional, or behavioral disorders (MEBs) in North American every year than children or adults were sick of died from the polio epidemic. The scale of the MEB epidemic on morbidity and mortality can be usefully compared to the 1950s polio epidemic. In 1955, 76,000 cases of paralytic polio were reported in Canada, the U.S., the former Soviet Union, Western Europe and New Zealand. In 1952, the highest year of cases in U.S. ??polioviruses caused 21,269 reported paralytic cases, including 3,145 deaths?; 1953 was the highest death rate in Canada for polio at 3.3 per 100,000 or 490 persons (Canadian Bulletin of Medical History). By comparison, the most extreme form MEB?s, suicidality and self harm in the U.S. kills 38,000 people, including about 5,000 young people each year plus results in another 700,000 treated in emergency rooms from self-injury?excluding single car crashes. In 2009, Statistics Canada reports that 3,890 people?including 479 young people?committed suicide or 11.5 per 100,000 (5). Such self-injury is tip of the epidemic of MEB?s. Today we have as good or better science for protecting or preventing mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders than we had in 1953 for protecting our children from polio. The Salk vaccine was not even perfect, yet after we used it and the weaker Sabine vaccine, polio virtually disappeared in America. We spent the equivalent of $35 billion (converted to current dollars) to achieve this, and we will continue to spend another $1.5 billion in the next few years to keep polio at bay in the US. Protecting all our futures is about launching powerful prevention science identified in the 2009 Institute of Medicine protect all our young people. This has tag is about alerting concerned people everywhere about action steps and scientific findings to protect all our children's futures (and our seniors) as consequence.