Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Have Had It." The second great paradox of polio follows naturally from the first: as a disabling disease, it is a product of civilized man's passion for sanitation, sewerage and other public-health measures. While other infectious diseases have decreased with higher living standards, paralytic polio has been increasing. Man himself is the only known natural reservoir of the virus. How it reaches him and enters his system is not known for certain, but the current consensus is: person to person, rather than by pests (though flies can carry the virus), and through the mouth...
...develop into a grave, feverish and perhaps paralytic illness. The reason why most of the populace seems to be immune, says Dr. Paul, is simply: "We have had it." But without knowing it. As U.S. standards of hygiene have gone up, so has the age range in which paralytic polio strikes. Nowadays. 22% of victims are adults. Strangely, the disease attacks more boys than girls under 20, but more women than men over...
...Great Breakthrough. Five years ago came the great breakthrough in the campaign to conquer polio. There had already been ill-starred attempts to make a vaccine, but in everything that they tried to do the researchers were hampered by one stubborn fact: most kinds of polio virus, it seemed, could be grown only in nerve tissues of living men or monkeys. And a vaccine prepared from such material would hold the frightful danger of causing an allergic inflammation of the brain, a malady even worse than the one it was designed to prevent...
...team of Harvard researchers headed by the brilliant virologist, John F. Enders, reported in Science in January 1949 that they had succeeded in growing polio viruses in tissue cultures of non-nervous tissues. From the obscure technical lan guage they used, only another virologist could have divined the explosive import of their work. In fact, Enders' discovery was to a polio vaccine (and to much other health-saving virus research) what Einstein's cryptic E = mc2 was to the atom bomb...
...take the shots soon to be offered. If any unfavorable reactions develop, they are likely to be minor, and if serious, as rare as the one case in 10,000 that reacts badly to diphtheria vaccine. A verdict on the effectiveness of the Salk vaccine, for a single polio season, must await Dr. Francis' report a year from now. Dr. Salk has high hope that his vaccine will lead the way to lifelong immunity; proof of this will take more years...