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N0KFQ > TODAY 26.04.15 15:39l 63 Lines 2792 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Apr 26
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1954
Polio vaccine trials begin
On this day in 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials,
involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman
Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United
States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used
for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby
neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation
was the vaccine or a placebo. On April 12, 1955, researchers
announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly
became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In
the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the
highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere.
Polio, known officially as poliomyelitis, is an infectious
disease that has existed since ancient times and is caused by a
virus. It occurs most commonly in children and can result in
paralysis. The disease reached epidemic proportions throughout
the first half of the 20th century. During the 1940s and 1950s,
polio was associated with the iron lung, a large metal tank
designed to help polio victims suffering from respiratory
paralysis breathe.
President Franklin Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at
the age of 39 and was left paralyzed from the waist down and
forced to use leg braces and a wheelchair for the rest of his
life. In 1938, Roosevelt helped found the National Foundation for
Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March of Dimes. The
organization was responsible for funding much of the research
concerning the disease, including the Salk vaccine trials.
The man behind the original vaccine was New York-born physician
and epidemiologist Jonas Salk (1914-95). Salk's work on an
anti-influenza vaccine in the 1940s, while at the University of
Michigan School of Public Health, led him, in 1952 at the
University of Pittsburgh, to develop the inactivated polio
vaccine (IPV), based on a killed-virus strain of the disease. The
1954 field trials that followed, the largest in U.S. history at
the time, were led by Salk's former University of Michigan
colleague, Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr.
In the late 1950s, Polish-born physician and virologist Albert
Sabin (1906-1993) tested an oral polio vaccine (OPV) he had
created from a weakened live virus. The vaccine, easier to
administer and cheaper to produce than Salk's, became available
for use in America in the early 1960s and eventually replaced
Salk's as the vaccine of choice in most countries.
Today, polio has been eliminated throughout much of the world due
to the vaccine; however, there is still no cure for the disease
and it persists in a small number of countries in Africa and
Asia.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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