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In 1953, American virologist Jonas Salk announced the development of the world's first safe and effective polio vaccine. Explore eight surprising facts about the vaccine that has nearly eradicated the most dreaded disease of the 20th century.

Although polio was the most feared disease of the 20th century, it was hardly the deadliest.

"Polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s," writes David M. Oshinsky in his Pulitzer Prize winning book "Polio: An American Story." During those decades, 10 times as many children died in accidents and three times as many succumbed to cancer. Oshinsky notes that polio inspired such fear because it struck without warning and researchers were unsure of how it spread from person to person. In the years following World War II, polls found the only thing Americans feared more than polio was nuclear war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt proved instrumental in the vaccine's development.

A year after his nomination as a Democratic vice presidential candidate, rising political star Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio while vacationing at his summer home on Campobello Island in 1921. The disease left the legs of the 39-year-old future president permanently paralyzed. In 1938, five years after entering the White House, Roosevelt helped to create the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation, which became the primary funding source for Salk's vaccine trials. Employing "poster children" and enlisting the star power of celebrities from Mickey Rooney to Mickey Mouse, the grassroots organization run by Roosevelt's former Wall Street law partner Basil O'Connor was raising more than $20 million per year by the late 1940s.

Salk challenged prevailing scientific orthodoxy in his vaccine development.

While most scientists believed that effective vaccines could only be developed with live viruses, Salk developed a "killed-virus" vaccine by growing samples of the virus and then deactivating them by adding formaldehyde so that they could no longer reproduce. By injecting the benign strains into the bloodstream, the vaccine tricked the immune system into manufacturing protective antibodies without the need to introduce a weakened form of the virus into healthy patients. Many researchers such as Polish-born virologist Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral "live-virus" polio vaccine, called Salk's approach dangerous. Sabin even belittled Salk as "a mere kitchen chemist." The hard-charging O'Connor, however, had grown impatient at the time-consuming process of developing a live-virus vaccine and put the resources of the March of Dimes behind Salk.

Salk tested the vaccine on himself and his family.

After successfully inoculating thousands of monkeys, Salk began the risky step of testing the vaccine on humans in 1952. In addition to administering the vaccine to children at two Pittsburgh-area institutions, Salk injected himself, his wife and his three sons in his kitchen after boiling the needles and syringes on his stovetop. Salk announced the success of the initial human tests to a national radio audience on March 26, 1953.

The clinical trial was the biggest public health experiment in American history.

On April 26, 1954, six-year-old Randy Kerr was injected with the Salk vaccine at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. By the end of June, an unprecedented 1.8 million people, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, joined him in becoming "polio pioneers." For the first time, researchers used the double-blind method, now standard, in which neither the patient nor person administering the inoculation knew if it was a vaccine or placebo. Although no one was certain that the vaccine was perfectly safe-in fact, Sabin argued it would cause more cases of polio than it would prevent-there was no shortage of volunteers.

Salk did not patent his vaccine.

On April 12, 1955, the day the Salk vaccine was declared "safe, effective and potent," legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Morrow interviewed its creator and asked who owned the patent. "Well, the people, I would say," said Salk in light of the millions of charitable donations raised by the March of Dimes that funded the vaccine's research and field testing. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Lawyers for the foundation had investigated the possibility of patenting the vaccine but did not pursue it, in part because of Salk's reluctance.

Although a tainted batch of the Salk vaccine killed 11 people, Americans continued vaccinating their children.

Just weeks after the Salk vaccine had been declared safe, more than 200 polio cases were traced to lots contaminated with virulent live polio strains manufactured by the Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California. Most taken ill became severely paralyzed. Eleven died. In the haste to rush the vaccine to the public, the federal government had not provided proper supervision of the major drug companies contracted by the March of Dimes to produce 9 million doses of vaccine for 1955. Although the United States surgeon general ordered all inoculations temporarily halted, Americans continued to vaccinate themselves and their children. Outside of the "Cutter Incident," not a single case of polio attributed to the Salk vaccine was ever contracted in the United States.

A rival vaccine supplanted Salk's in the 1960s.

Once Sabin's oral vaccine finally became available in 1962, it quickly supplanted Salk's injected vaccine because it was cheaper to produce and easier to administer. Ultimately, both vaccines produced by the bitter rivals nearly eradicated the disease from the planet. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were only 416 reported cases of polio worldwide in 2013, mostly confined to a handful of Asian and African countries. Since Sabin's live-virus vaccine, which is responsible for about a dozen cases of polio each year, is seen as the final obstacle to eliminating the disease in most of the world, the WHO has urged polio-free countries to return to Salk's killed-virus vaccine.

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8 Things You May Not Know About Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine

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In 1953, American virologist Jonas Salk announced the development of the world's first safe and effective polio vaccine. Explore eight surprising facts about the vaccine that has nearly eradicated the most dreaded disease of the 20th century. "Polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s," writes David M.

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Here David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond.

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DR. SALK'S GREAT DISCOVERY - POLIO VACCINE DISCOVERED 1953

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For licensing inquiries please contact Historic Films Archive (info@historicfilms.com / http://www.historicfilms.com) 00:00 (TC: 00.40.22): CU MICROSCOPIC POLIO VIRUS ENLARGED. 00:12 (TC: 00.40.34): UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CAMPUS. 1955. SCIENTISTS ARRIVE. MEN WHEEL IN COPIES OF SALK'S FINDINGS. REPORTERS CROWD AND PUSH, HANDS IN THE AIR GRABBING FOR COPIES. TYPING UP NEWS STORY.

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Bio: Jonas Edward Salk was an American medical researcher and virologist, best known for his discovery and development of the first polio vaccine. He was born in New York City to parents from Ashkenazi Jewish Russian immigrant families. Although they did not have much formal education, his parents were determined to see their children succeed.

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Bio: Jonas Edward Salk was an American medical researcher and virologist, best known for his discovery and development of the first polio vaccine. He was born in New York City to parents from Ashkenazi Jewish Russian immigrant families. Although they did not have much formal education, his parents were determined to see their children succeed.

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http://youtu.be/sX9xieqqO_g

Video of polio survivor

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www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pic/articles/PMC2878826/

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On March 26, 1953, American medical researcher Dr. Jonas Salk announces on a national radio show that he has successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, the virus that causes the crippling disease of polio. In 1952-an epidemic year for polio-there were 58,000 new cases reported in the United States, and more than 3,000 died from the disease. For promising eventually to eradicate the disease, which is known as "infant paralysis" because it mainly affects children, Dr. Salk was celebrated as the great doctor-benefactor of his time.

Polio, a disease that has affected humanity throughout recorded history, attacks the nervous system and can cause varying degrees of paralysis. Since the virus is easily transmitted, epidemics were commonplace in the first decades of the 20th century. The first major polio epidemic in the United States occurred in Vermont in the summer of 1894, and by the 20th century thousands were affected every year. In the first decades of the 20th century, treatments were limited to quarantines and the infamous "iron lung," a metal coffin-like contraption that aided respiration. Although children, and especially infants, were among the worst affected, adults were also often afflicted, including future president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1921 was stricken with polio at the age of 39 and was left partially paralyzed. Roosevelt later transformed his estate in Warm Springs, Georgia, into a recovery retreat for polio victims and was instrumental in raising funds for polio-related research and the treatment of polio patients.

Salk, born in New York City in 1914, first conducted research on viruses in the 1930s when he was a medical student at New York University, and during World War II helped develop flu vaccines. In 1947, he became head of a research laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh and in 1948 was awarded a grant to study the polio virus and develop a possible vaccine. By 1950, he had an early version of his polio vaccine.

Salk's procedure, first attempted unsuccessfully by American Maurice Brodie in the 1930s, was to kill several strains of the virus and then inject the benign viruses into a healthy person's bloodstream. The person's immune system would then create antibodies designed to resist future exposure to poliomyelitis. Salk conducted the first human trials on former polio patients and on himself and his family, and by 1953 was ready to announce his findings. This occurred on the CBS national radio network on the evening of March 25 and two days later in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Salk became an immediate celebrity.

In 1954, clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on nearly two million American schoolchildren. In April 1955, it was announced that the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began. New polio cases dropped to under 6,000 in 1957, the first year after the vaccine was widely available. In 1962, an oral vaccine developed by Polish-American researcher Albert Sabin became available, greatly facilitating distribution of the polio vaccine. Today, there are just a handful of polio cases in the United States every year, and most of these are "imported" by Americans from developing nations where polio is still a problem. Among other honors, Jonas Salk was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. He died in La Jolla, California, in 1995.

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journal of the american medical association

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Salk announces polio vaccine - Mar 26, 1953 - HISTORY.com

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On March 26, 1953, American medical researcher Dr. Jonas Salk announces on a national radio show that he has successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, the virus that causes the crippling disease of polio. In 1952-an epidemic year for polio-there were 58,000 new cases reported in the United States, and more than 3,000 died from the disease.

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This is a certificate that's shows that this person had been one of the first humans to be ever tested for the cure to polio.

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When I was growing up in the 1940's, come summertime, my mother wouldn't let me swim in public swimming pools or go to the beach at the neighborhood pond.

Of course, I thought this was horribly unfair. But she had a very good reason, one that may not be familiar to anyone under age 60: Polio.

Also known as infantile paralysis, polio is an incurable viral disease that often leaves those infected - frequently children - with lasting paralysis in their limbs, even their lungs. The infection was thought to spread through the water, which is why for years there was no summer swimming for me and thousands of other kids.

Indeed, for years, the threat of polio was what terrified American mothers the most. A child coming down with an unexpected and unexplained fever was cause for enormous family alarm. Then came one of the biggest breakthroughs in medical history, announced right here at the University of Michigan.

On April 12, 1955 at the Rackham Auditorium, the world learned that a "safe, effective and potent" polio vaccine had been developed. Dr. Thomas Francis, head of the epidemiology department at the newly formed School of Public Health and later the director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center, made the announcement to a jam-packed audience.

Among those present was his colleague, Dr. Jonas Salk, who actually developed the vaccine. I was a junior in high school at that time and was there. I listened in amazement as the speakers told the story: More than 1.8 million children participated in the field trials that validated the safe use of the Salk vaccine; $17.5 million was spent on the field trials; data were collected from the U.S., Canada and Finland; 20,000 physicians took part in the research.

Polio had been effectively vanquished.

The event left me convinced that medical science, properly organized and focused, fully funded and in the public interest, was and is one of the shining achievements of America.

Recent sharp cuts in federal funding for the National Science Foundation and other basic research efforts led me to more than wonder about the priorities of our leaders in Washington.

Years after the vaccine was announced, that memory triggered my enthusiasm for " The Man He Became," a book which chronicles Franklin Delano Roosevelt's infection with polio, which struck him at age 39, and his long and exhausting struggles literally to learn to stand and walk again, right through his eventual election as President.

Ann Arbor-based author James Tobin, a former Detroit News reporter, has written a psychologically acute account of how Roosevelt's struggles to overcome his adversity forged a new, stronger, deeper person out of the ambitious and aristocratic scion of a famous family.

In his play, "As You Like It," William Shakespeare wrote:

"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head."

Roosevelt internalized his long struggle to cope with the terrible effects of polio by realizing there were countless others who needed help. He bought and developed at Warm Springs, Georgia a resort devoted to the most advanced treatments for polio. Over the years, he developed a capacity for empathy, learning to reach beyond the boundaries of his aristocratic family upbringing.

That ultimately resulted in a profound character change that re-made Roosevelt into the warm, popular figure known to millions. Tobin concludes FDR became president less in spite of polio than because of polio - and chronicles how he was shaped by the disease.

In my own life, I've experienced adversity, but nothing like what FDR went through. I broke my back when I was 18, which required a spinal fusion. As I lay in my hospital bed, hurting and feeling very sorry for myself, I looked out the door to see a patient with both arms amputated, being rolled past in a wheelchair.

"Now there's somebody who's really badly off," I thought to myself. I gritted my teeth, rolled out of bed and went over to talk. And I realized that the guy in the wheelchair was far braver than I, far more able to accommodate to his dire condition and far more courageous in facing his future. I never forgot that encounter, and when I read "The Man He Became," it all came back to me movingly.

The uses of adversity are many and powerful: to provide a sense of proportion, a spur for personal courage and humility, a better sense of membership in the entire human condition.

With so many posturing - dare I say, narcissistic? - aspiring national leaders running around these days, it would be interesting to know what sort of adversity each has faced. It might be even more telling to learn how they responded to and were shaped by it.

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Phil Power: A broken back, polio and the test of character

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When I was growing up in the 1940's, come summertime, my mother wouldn't let me swim in public swimming pools or go to the beach at the neighborhood pond. Of course, I thought this was horribly unfair. But she had a very good reason, one that may not be familiar to anyone under age 60: Polio.

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Dr. Jonas Salk speaking at UCLA 2/18/1972

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From the archives of the UCLA Communications Studies Department. Digitized 2013. The views and ideas expressed in these videos are not necessarily shared by the University of California, or by the Communication Studies Department.

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OpenMind - Interview with Dr. Jonas Salk (1985)

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Featuring: sustainability, future world, polio vaccine, destiny, nature, survival and life & purpose. Episode: "Man Evolving..."

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Polio has been painted as some natural scourge of humanity. Yet, epidemics and outbreaks of polio in Europe go back to only less than 100 years. Outbreaks of polio after 1950 were demonstrably caused by intensified diphtheria and whooping cough vaccination, tonsillectomies, other injections (painkillers) and a variety of traumas. There is now evidence that polio paralysis has also been a very common yet discreetly hidden side effect associated with polio vaccines.

They called it the Cutter incident and claimed that some of the vaccines (produced by the Cutter Laboratories) contained live polio virus. So, the company withdrew their vaccines despite polio vaccines produced by other manufacturers also causing paralysis in this outbreak.

Although the vaccines are officially causing paralysis, allegedly only 10-12 reported cases per year in the USA. The word 'reported' is the key word here. With the mass use of the polio vaccines and continuing occurence of polio in the vaccinated, the necessity arose to redefine the disease polio. The classical definition of polio is a disease with residual paralysis which resolves within 2 months (usually within days). The new definition of polio now is 'a disease with residual paralysis persisting for more than 60 days.' This is the secret formula of 'eradication' of polio. Children are still getting polio, but those cases which resolve within 60 days (which represent some 90% of cases) are not diagnosed as polio. A new disease emerged: viral meningitis and as the incidence of polio plummeted, so did the incidence of viral meningitis sky rocketed.

The best (and perhaps most frightening) example of these "elegant administrative moves" is how they allegedly eliminated polio in the Americas (meaning South America). The Journal of Infectious Diseases published in 1991 the results of a major vaccination drive between 1985 and 1989 to eliminate polio. Within 4 months they had a huge outbreak of paralytic polio (350 cases). They decided to reformulate the vaccine. Now if this outbreak had occurred in the unvaccinated they would not have had to reformulate the vaccine. The outbreak occurred in the vaccinated.

However, the outbreaks with ever increasing number of reported cases of 'flaccid paralysis' in the vaccinated continued. So what did they do? They started discarding most of the reported cases of flaccid paralysis. Out of 2094 reported cases they only 'confirmed' 130, the rest (1964) were discarded. They published a graph which shows ever increasing number of reported cases as shadowy columns in the background and the ever decreasing numbers of confirmed cases as black columns in the forefront. I praise them for publishing it this way: any discerning and unbrainwashed reader can see very clearly what happened in the Americas between 1985 - 1989: mass vaccination caused sustained outbreaks of paralytic polio and they tried to camouflage it by discarding the vast majority of cases. When they finally stopped the program in 1989, even the number of reported cases (shown as those shadowy columns in the background) went down.

The same happened in other countries: huge epidemics of paralysis followed mass-vaccination drives.

Acute Flaccid Paralysis is a term which applies to the exact clinical symptoms you would expect to see from poliovirus infection, but which are not necessarily caused by polioviruses. Paralytic polio is actually considered a sub-category in the broad umbrella of acute flaccid paralysis. on the Oxford Journals website for a chart and summary of many other causes of AFP, a few of which are: Guillaine-Barre syndrome, Cytomegalovirus polyradiculomyelopathy, Acute transverse myelitis, Lyme borreliosis, nonpolio enterovirus and Toxic myopathies.

For many years the medical profession assumed that when they saw paralysis with a particular cluster of symptoms, it was poliomyelitis. The 1954 Francis Trials of the Salk vaccine triggered a reconsideration of this assumption, and a major change in the diagnostic criteria.

The 1954 "polio" data includes all paralysis. While some of this may have been from polio, in reality, much of it was from other causes. With the change of diagnostic criteria in 1955 that reduced case numbers, followed by laboratory testing that excluded vast numbers of other causes, the 1961 data only includes the small subgroup of paralysis caused by poliomyelitis. This is then compared with the catch-all 1954 definition. Because it was impossible to know what proportion of 1954 data were really caused by poliomyelitis viruses, the 1954 data was left as it was, and nothing of the back story is revealed to the readers. When people say: "we know the polio vaccine saved us from huge epidemics of this devastating disease" they are basing their knowledge on misinformation.

The numbers used in the worldwide program to eradicate polio were estimates using very loose standards that hypothesized the number of cases, and extrapolated them across large areas before vaccination campaigns were ignited. This was followed by much stricter diagnostic standards that weeded out Acute Flaccid Paralysis from other causes.

As the number of cases subjected to laboratory analysis rose, and the number of cases of polio dropped, the number of cases of acute flaccid paralysis rose.

The Polio Global Eradication Initiative (PGEI), founded in 1988 by the World Health Organization, Rotary International, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, holds up India as a prime example of its success at eradicating polio, stating on its website (Jan. 11 2012) that "India has made unprecedented progress against polio in the last two years and on 13 January, 2012, India will reach a major milestone - a 12-month period without any case of polio being recorded."

This report, however, is highly misleading, as an estimated 100-180 Indian children are diagnosed with vaccine-associated polio paralysis (VAPP) each year. In fact, the clinical presentation of the disease, including paralysis, caused by VAPP is indistinguishable from that caused by wild polioviruses, making the PGEI's pronouncements all the more suspect.

According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative's own statistics2 there were 42 cases of wild-type polio (WPV) reported in India in 2010, indicating that vaccine-induced cases of polio paralysis (100-180 annually) outnumber wild-type cases by a factor of 3-4. Even if we put aside the important question of whether or not the PGEI is accurately differentiating between wild and vaccine-associated polio cases in their statistics, we still must ask ourselves: should not the real-world effects of immunization, both good and bad, be included in PGEI's measurement of success? For the dozens of Indian children who develop vaccine-induced paralysis every year, the PGEI's recent declaration of India as nearing "polio free" status, is not only disingenuous, but could be considered an attempt to minimize their obvious liability in having transformed polio from a natural disease vector into a manmade (iatrogenic) one.

Polio underscores the need for a change in the way we look at so-called "vaccine preventable" diseases as a whole. In most people with a healthy immune system, a poliovirus infection does not even generate symptoms. Only rarely does the infection produce minor symptoms, e.g. sore throat, fever, gastrointestinal disturbances, and influenza-like illness. In only 3% of infections does virus gain entry to the central nervous system, and then, in only 1-5 in 1000 cases does the infection progress to paralytic disease.

Due to the fact that polio spreads through the fecal-oral route (i.e. the virus is transmitted from the stool of an infected person to the mouth of another person through a contaminated object, e.g. utensil) focusing on hygiene, sanitation and proper nutrition (to support innate immunity) is a logical way to prevent transmission in the first place, as well as reducing morbidity associated with an infection when it does occur.

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Polio Vaccinations Are Now The Number One Cause of Polio Paralysis

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Polio has been painted as some natural scourge of humanity. Yet, epidemics and outbreaks of polio in Europe go back to only less than 100 years. Outbreaks of polio after 1950 were demonstrably caused by intensified diphtheria and whooping cough vaccination, tonsillectomies, other injections (painkillers) and a variety of traumas.

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WHEW FIGHT POLIO