Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...explanation is that jabbing a hypodermic into the muscle means cutting or tearing a number of nerves which then offer the virus particles a direct pathway to the brain or spine. This seems plausible because inoculations against other diseases, e.g., diphtheria, may trigger a polio infection even when no polio virus is introduced and the only common factor is the use of the needle...
Short or Long. To buttress his arguments-that a live virus is better and confers longer immunity-Researcher Sabin went to the Eskimos. In one of their isolated communities immunity against polio was shown to have endured for 40 years after the last previous encounter with the virus. Use of the short-term killed vaccine, argues Sabin, might leave U.S. parents with the necessity of having their children reinoculated every year...
Graver still was the fact that polio is likely to be more serious the older the victim. If children are protected by a series of short-term immunizations, they might grow into young adults with no lasting immunity and a dangerous susceptibility to paralytic polio...
...live vaccine safe? Dr. Salk, for one, does not think so. Although the live-virus method has been used successfully in the long-established smallpox and yellow fever vaccines, he believes that the polio virus is too tough and tricky to permit development in safe, nonvimlent form. Dr. Sabin disagrees, thinks it can be done. Growing virus strains of all three types under hothouse conditions, he found some that, when injected into the spinal cords of chimpanzees, produced no paralysis. All they did was to stimulate the animals to produce antibodies against any future invading polio virus. And these antibodies...
Only Setback. For human subjects he chose Ohio's Chillicothe Federal Reformatory. Of 30 volunteers (between the ages of 21 and 30), 26 got a minute droplet of a single strain of polio virus in a teaspoon-ul of milk. The human guinea pigs proved even more susceptible than the chimpanzees to the desired kind of infection. They did not get sick in any apparent way Yet the virus multiplied in their digestive tracts, boosted their antibody levels and was excreted in the stools for one to twelve weeks. It was in this connection Dr. Sabin reported his only...