Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wrong came when a six-year-old San Diego youngster, Lawrence Vicker, got home for lunch from Eugene Field School and complained that he did not feel like eating. What was more, he had a stiff neck. His mother took his temperature: 103°. Here were three symptoms of polio (although several other diseases cause similar symptoms). Yet Larry, like 26,000 other San Diego children, had been inoculated only five days earlier with the Salk vaccine...
...hospital, it became clear that Larry indeed had polio. There were two possibilities. Since it was, after all, the beginning of the polio season, he might have been exposed to it before he was inoculated. Or he might have caught the disease from defective vaccine...
What Went Wrong? On the day Larry Vicker was stricken, a 13-month-old boy in Pocatello, Idaho got sick too. He had been vaccinated eight days earlier. Also in Pocatello, Susan Pierce, seven, became ill with bulbar polio three days after her inoculation. Within two days she was dead. In Moscow, Idaho, another seven-year-old girl died. A rash of cases was reported, from Napa, Calif, to Chicago...
...Public Health Service made a hurried check. All reported cases of polio among vaccinated children were youngsters who had received vaccine made by the Cutter Laboratories. This raised the agonizing possibility that a batch of vaccine had gone through with some live virus in it. Like all vaccines, the Salk preparation contains germs of the disease that it is meant to fight. In the Salk process, these virus particles are killed, with formaldehyde, so that they cannot keep the power to infect (but retain the power to help the system build antibodies). Although this apparently did not happen...
...shipping anything: instead, it is piled high with boxes full of bright red vaccine, being returned for testing from all over the U.S. The job will take weeks. As for the children already vaccinated, the evidence might be almost as long in coming. The incubation period-when polio virus can be multiplying in the human body without causing detectable symptoms-varies from three to 35 days. And the vaccine does not begin to be effective (that is, to develop antibodies against the multiplication of the virus) in less than seven to ten days...