Word: polio
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...completely they make us forget what we owe them. By that measure, Dr. Jonas E. Salk ranks very high. Partly because of the vaccine he introduced in the mid-1950s, it's hard now to recall the sheer terror that was once connected to the word polio. The incidence of the disease had risen sharply in the early part of this century, and every year brought the threat of another outbreak. Parents were haunted by the stories of children stricken suddenly by the telltale cramps and fever. Public swimming pools were deserted for fear of contagion. And year after year...
...that is hard to remember, because by the time of Salk's death last week, of heart failure at the age of 80, polio was virtually gone from the U.S. and nearing extinction throughout the world. The beginning of the end for the virus can be dated precisely. On April 12, 1955, a Salk colleague announced that a vaccine developed by Salk and tested on more than 1 million schoolchildren had proved "safe, effective and potent." As a result of the nationwide effort of mass inoculation that followed, new cases in the U.S. dropped to fewer than...
After the war Salk headed the viral-research program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he gradually devoted his studies to polio. When he began his work, medical wisdom held that vaccines, to be effective, should use live viruses that had been rendered harmless in the laboratory. Salk believed it would be possible to make a vaccine using killed viruses; this method, he thought, was preferable since it carried less risk of actually causing the disease the vaccine was meant to prevent. When animal tests on an experimental vaccine proved successful, he moved on to human tests in which...
...Jonas Salk,the medical pioneer who developed the first polio vaccine, died of heart failure in La Jolla, Calif. this afternoon. Salk became a hero to millions of Americans in the 1950s when he ignored scientific doubters and used killed virus to develop the polio vaccine. Similarly, he ignored skeptics later in life when he tried to devise a vaccine-like treatment for AIDS...
...through muscle rehabilitation and physical therapy, Coleman successfully fought polio and stood on crutches at his graduation from the University of California at Los Angeles. Previously he had been wheelchair-bound...