Word: polio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Polio is a disease of highly sanitized communities. For thousands of years, the majority of children playing in dirty streets picked up the virus and developed their own antibodies. As Americans became more and more concerned about child hygiene, whole generations matured with no immunity. The numbers of reported cases rose, until in 1952 there were 57,879 confirmed cases and 3,145 deaths. Parents suffered perennial panics...
Injected into some 5,000 volunteers, the vaccine appeared to offer good protection with minimum side effects to people over the age of 23. But it caused high fever in a significant number of youngsters. Concerned by these results, Dr. Albert Sabin, developer of oral polio vaccine and originally a supporter of Ford's program, reversed himself and said that unless there is an actual outbreak, the vaccinations should be limited to "high-risk" people, notably the aged and chronically ill. A rival polio-vaccine pioneer, Dr. Jonas Salk, disagrees. Describing the vaccine as safe, he pointed out that...
...which makes him admire one of his friends, another Widener scholar who sat sipping coffee at the same lunch table. The woman, who also asked that her name be withheld, has been a Ph.D. mathematician and physicist in her native Austria, an antiquarian and linguist after an attack of polio, the coordinator of an African education project, the author of an article on the artist Oskar Kokoschka, and is currently a student of plants. She explained her activities without the rabbi's serious tone in what she called a characteristic "lighter vein...
...pressure has been paying off in new freedom and opportunity for those in wheelchairs. Says Jack Smith, 36, a polio victim who is director of the White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals: "You can't believe how meaningful it is to go and participate and enjoy the same things as everyone else...
Ford's request had the backing of a blue-ribbon medical advisory committee-including Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, of polio vaccine fame-but critics of the program charge that the Administration left unanswered some nagging questions. Among them...