Word: sabin
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Often it was hard to pick one person to credit for a particular advance. Some cases involved famous rivalries, such as Farnsworth vs. Vladimir Zworykin over inventing television, or Jonas Salk vs. Albert Sabin over developing a polio vaccine. Other cases, such as the creation of the atom bomb or the computer, involved a series of contributions. Although there is a danger in personalizing history, there is also an advantage. By choosing the people we feel were most responsible for key breakthroughs, and then exploring their relations and rivalries, we hope to convey the human excitement that makes real...
Thus a monument to the conquest of polio faithful to the facts would consist of not one man in a white lab coat but two of them glaring at each other. Both Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin could and did make convincing cases for themselves and pretty good ones against each other too. But since the public usually prefers one hero to two, and since Salk did get there first, he got the monument...
...Sabin vaccine, however, that actually eliminated polio epidemics in America. Today, of the 20 million doses of polio vaccine on the market, less than 500,000 are prepared from "killed'' viruses. In fact, there have been no home-grown cases of naturally occurring polio in the U.S. since 1979. With the chances of a major outbreak so remote, the U.S. could switch to a killed-virus vaccine. There's a catch, however. There is no way to prevent someone who is just developing the infection from arriving in the U.S. and spreading it. One in five American children is unvaccinated...
...will be a tough sell. As Dr. Ram Yogev of Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago points out, the Sabin vaccine worked so well that health workers may resist the change. Says Dr. Yogev, who favors the change himself: "Physicians respect Salk. But we love Sabin because we saw the epidemic. We were a part of it, and suddenly it disappeared...
Inconvenience and expense are also factors. The Sabin vaccine comes in a sweet-tasting liquid, but the Salk vaccine can only be injected. Parents and youngsters will not welcome another shot in the already packed vaccination schedule. The injections cost more ($4.99 a dose in the public market vs. $2.27 for the live virus) and may mean another trip to the doctor. Some are worried that the immunization rate, particularly in inner cities, will drop...