Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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While the U.S. as a whole reported 37% fewer cases in the current polio season than last year (2,295 since April 1, as against 3,613), a swift outbreak hit Chicago and suburbs. Almost every hour of every day last week, workers stuck a pin into a wall map in the office of Chicago's Health Boss Herman N. Bundesen. The red pins stood for new cases of paralytic polio, yellow for nonparalytic, black for fatal cases. By week's end there were 268 pins-166 red, 97 yellow, five black (as against 39 cases, two deaths...
...were under six years old-meaning that they had not been among the 110,000 schoolchildren who got free Salk shots in classroom clinics before vacations began. Of the five dead, three were under six, one was 28, one 34. Twenty-two of the victims had been vaccinated against polio, but most had had only one shot of vaccine, instead of the ideal three spread over seven months...
...distribution. Poliomyelitis is usually most virulent among the well-scrubbed, well-laundered middle and upper classes. But half of Chicago's cases came from a tenement section on the West Side, inhabited largely by Negro and Puerto Rican immigrants. In such families, most children get mild, undetected polio infections in their early years, and such infections give them immunity for life. One guess: the children stricken had been infected before with polio virus of one paralytic strain, while the current outbreak might have been caused by a different strain...
...famed University of Pittsburgh laboratories where the Salk polio vaccine was invented, Dr. Gisela Ruckle, a German émigrée, reported that she had grown 25 generations of the measles virus in test tubes. The virus had hitherto defied domestication; now researchers may be able to make an effective measles vaccine...
...Polio Progress...