Sunday, April 12, 2015

Sixty Years Ago

The first polio vaccine, developed by Dr. Jonas Salk, was declared to be safe, effective and potent.


Fewer and fewer people remember the terror of "polio summer" each year, or the gut-wrenching fear of a local outbreak.

All that began to end sixty years ago.

It was said that more people in the early 1950s knew of the status of research into a polio vaccine than they did about the status of legislation in Washington. A few years later, in collaboration between scientists in the Soviet Union and the United States, an even more effective oral vaccine was developed and tested in the USSR.

1979 marked the last recorded cases* of polio in the U.S. The scourge of polio had left our shores

Iron lungs are now virtually a medical curio, though there are a few polio survivors who still use them.
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* Among the Amish, a group opposed to vaccination. And no, they didn't learn from that.
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2 comments:

  1. Stewart Dean4/12/2015 6:14 PM

    My mother was almost totally paralyzed by polio in 1948. She had been a sparkling fox of a woman (from the family movies) and in a matter of days was trapped in a flaccid body. She went to Warm Springs, and recovered minimal use of her hands (she could crawl her hand, but not lift her arms)... nothing else. Her daily example of courage and spirit showed me what courage really is...so much greater than steroidal testeronic crap of Schwartzenegger, Norris or Stallone.
    I grew up taking care of her.

    http://www.sdean.net/myfamily.htm#GoneBefore

    Among other things, I would take her in the wheel chair and operate the voting machine at her direction.

    And you damn well better believe the family had all our shots. I can remember standing in line for first the Salk and then the Sabin vaccines.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4/16/2015 5:36 AM

    My Dad told me when he was a kid in the '30's / '40's, you could stand at a street corner and turning the four directions, see at least one victim of polio within a block of your location. A few classmates of his died of polio during summer vacations. Polio was a scourge!

    He told me that Jonas Salk was a miracle, that I did not understand how much the discovery of the vaccine changed life back then. He said it would be akin to discovering a cure for cancer.

    Different times to be sure - thanks for the post.

    ReplyDelete

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