26 April 2009
Vaccine Milestones: Salk, Sabin, and Polio
By Elizabeth Fee
Fee is the chief of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. She prepared these articles exclusively for eJournal USA.
Poliomyelitis has afflicted humankind since ancient times, causing muscle wasting, paralysis, and sometimes death. In the 1940s, scientists found that the poliovirus exists in three basic types and that it can be grown in tissue cultures. American researcher and physician Jonas Salk killed the poliovirus with formaldehyde and produced a vaccine. In 1954 the United States launched a nationwide testing of the vaccine with the mass inoculation of hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. In what has become known as the Cutter incident, 200 children caught polio and 11 of them died. All the cases were traced to a single poorly made batch from one drug company. More careful production standards were developed and the vaccinations successfully resumed; as a result, the numbers of children paralyzed by polio fell dramatically.
Whereas Salk’s vaccine was a killed-virus vaccine, Polish-American physician Albert Sabin developed a live-virus vaccine, using a weakened or attenuated form of the live virus. Whereas the Salk vaccine was used in the United States, 10 million children in the Soviet Union received the Sabin vaccine in 1959 in a World Health Organization test. Because it was relatively easy to produce and because it could be taken by mouth—often on a sugar cube—instead of by injection, the Sabin vaccine soon became the most popular polio vaccine around the world. Continued vigilant and coordinated use of the Salk and Sabin vaccines has now eradicated polio from most of the world’s nations.
From the March 2007 edition of eJournal USA, “Lifesaving Vaccines”
