Word: sabin
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Over the past few years, some parents and their pediatricians have waged a grass-roots effort to change the way 4 million U.S. children are vaccinated each year. Their struggle has reawakened a 40-year-old scientific argument between two giants of preventive medicine: Dr. Albert Sabin and Dr. Jonas Salk. Last week the parents' campaign reached the highest levels of health policymaking when a CDC panel voted on whether to change U.S. policy...
...contrast, the second preparation, which was championed by Sabin, is made from weakened--yet not entirely docile--strains of the polio virus. It provokes a more powerful immune response. If it doesn't give the recipient polio (and in 99.99996% of cases it does not), it not only protects those who are inoculated but also prevents them from passing on any "wild-type" infections. That is small consolation to parents like Carol Philips of Brooksville, Florida. Her son Ryan, 10, developed polio soon after receiving the Sabin vaccine. "If I had chosen the other," Philips says, "Ryan would be fine...
...time a man in a white lab coat might have delighted Salk's peers in medical research. Instead many of them resented him as a man who reaped the glory for work that had been pioneered by less celebrated scientists all around the world. By 1962 Dr. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine, derived from live viruses, had become the preferred method of inoculation in the U.S., and Sabin was bitter about Salk's earlier triumph. Just a few years before his own death in 1993 Sabin claimed that "Salk didn't discover anything." Salk himself was often uncomfortable with...
...generation ago, no one had ever heard of Lyme or Legionnaires' disease, much less AIDS. Back in the 1970s, medical researchers were even boasting that humanity's victory against infectious disease was just a matter of time. The polio virus had been tamed by the Salk and Sabin vaccines; the smallpox virus was virtually gone; the parasite that causes malaria was in retreat; once deadly illnesses, including diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus, seemed like quaint reminders of a bygone era, like Model T Fords or silent movies...
...explain, for example, why so many people are coming down with postpolio syndrome now. The great postwar epidemic peaked in the U.S. in 1952, when more than 20,000 children were paralyzed by polio, and it tapered off in the early '60s, after the Salk vaccine and then the Sabin oral version were introduced. The first wave of postpolio symptoms appeared in the early 1980s, 30 years after the epidemic's peak, and if researchers are correct, the last wave should subside...