Polio patients inside iron lungs
Guardian
Parents panicked, trying to keep their children safe: An edict barring children under 7 from school and other public places was promulgated, perhaps postponing the opening of all grades if the situation worsened. Local public health authority advised parents to keep young children in their backyards: alone!
As families clamoured for research into the deadly polio disease, two young doctors searched for cures. Albert Sabin (1906-1993) was born in Bialystok Poland, facing intense anti-Semitism. In 1921, at 15, Albert’s parents moved him to New Jersey to join relatives. A brilliant student, Albert soon learned English well enough to excel in high school.
One of Albert’s uncles was a dentist and he promised to pay for Albert’s dentistry training. Albert enrolled in New York University; he loved medicine and science, but not dentistry. So he took extra jobs and scholarships to finance medical school alone. He graduated in Medicine at N.Y Uni in 1931, the year a major polio outbreak panicked N.Y, so Sabin decided to devote himself to polio research. He trained as a pathologist, studying in London and New York before moving in 1939 to study viruses at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital Research Foundation
Dr Albert Sabin (above)
Aish
Dr Jonas Salk
Washington Post
In WW2 Dr Sabin became a Colonel in the Medical Corps, studying viruses affecting American troops. He studied sand-fly fever which was damaging troops in North Africa; he showed that the disease was being spread by mosquitoes and that mosquito repellent helped reduce the disease. Sabin also conducted vital wartime research on dengue fever, toxoplasmosis and encephalitis. A vaccine he co-develop against encephalitis was given to c70,000 American troops preparing to invade Japan.
Jonas Salk (1914-1995) was born in the Bronx NY to a poor, large Jewish family. Early on, Jonas realised he wanted to change the world via medical research. He went to City College and New York University’s Medical School. In 1947, Prof Salk at Pittsburgh University School of Medicine undertook a long project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus and to develop a vaccine against polio. Did he know that in 1949, a poliovirus was successfully cultivated in human tissue by John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins at Boston Children’s Hospital, recognised with the 1954 Nobel Prize?
Dr Salk was part of a prestigious team surveying all U.S polio cases when it became clear that any effective vaccine would have to contain strains from 3 distinct polio variations. Dr Salk was undeterred, and his self-confidence irritated other researchers, but the research team believed they were correctly focused. Salk drew on recent research about growing vaccines in animal tissues under laboratory conditions, cultivating polio viruses in monkey kidney cells. He then killed these virus cells using formaldehyde. Salk’s goal was to develop a vaccine using dead polio cells, clashing with conventional medical wisdom.
Meanwhile Sabin was growing a live-cell vaccine. His vaccine had the advantage of using manipulated polio cells: since these were not the same cells that caused diseases in humans, it was thought that Sabin’s live virus vaccine was safer. It also had the advantage of being able to be administered orally, instead of through an injection as the dead virus vaccines were. Professional rivalry continued.
Salk’s dead cell vaccine had been tested only on animals, since officials feared testing it on humans. So in 1954 Salk injected his vaccine into himself, his wife and children, the first humans to be vaccinated with this invention. When no ill effects occurred, the world begged for his vaccine.
Also in 1954 the charity March of Dimes arranged a large-scale polio trial for a million children aged 6-9. The trial was given major media coverage, alienating many scientists and doctors; they still saw Dr Salk as over-confident. Nonetheless finding a vaccine for polio was the top priority. Half the children in the trial received Salk’s vaccine and the other half received placebos. Dr Salk had succeeded.
At a press conference at Michigan Uni in Ap 1955, 50,000+ doctors viewed the broadcast in theatre screenings while ordinary citizens tuned into the radio. When it was announced that Dr Salk’s polio vaccine was both safe and effective, church bells rang; parents of young children wept; drug companies started production of Salk doses.
Polio vaccine
BBC
In 1956, Sabin travelled to Russia to work with Russian virologists. He created a team with Dr Mikhail Chumakov, the man responsible for Salk vaccine tests in the Soviet Union, performing initial tests of the live-attenuated vaccine using a Sabin seed virus. Trials were carried out on millions Russian children in 1958 and 10 million children in 1959, and on Czech and Hungarian children in Dec 1959.
Remember Dr Sabin’s vaccine could be taken orally, without needing follow-up doses. By the mid-1960s, Dr Sabin’s became the preferred vaccine in the U.S.
Remember Dr Sabin’s vaccine could be taken orally, without needing follow-up doses. By the mid-1960s, Dr Sabin’s became the preferred vaccine in the U.S.
After abolishing polio, the two doctors diverged. Jonas Salk conducted research on AIDS in the 1980s. His greatest post-polio success was establishing San Diego’s Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, bringing scientists together. Albert Sabin conducted research into cancer, becoming president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in 1970, until illness intervened. Sabin died in 1993 at 86, while Salk died in 1995 at 80. By then polio was a disease of the past. Their vaccines had saved thousands of lives and changed society, but neither ever patented the vaccines!
Dr Joe