Word: salk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Weakening Strain. This sort of thing apparently had not happened in Dr. Salk's own labs. But if it could happen anywhere, it raised a fundamental question: should any strain of virus that is likely to cause paralysis be used in the vaccine? Dr. Salk had long contended that the Mahoney strain which he picked to represent all the Type I strains, was safe because it was killed; critics had damned it in the live state as the most virulent form known, and the likeliest to cause paralysis. Now, Dr. Salk wavered: Mahoney was a good strain because...
Then there was the question of injecting the vaccine in 1 cc. (¼-teaspoonful) doses into the arm muscle-the method now in use. Dr. Salk had tried using only one-tenth of this amount in a tricky intradermal injection-between the layers of the skin. This, he found, was not enough...
...have got around this by using ⅓ cc. under the skin.) Some experts oppose injections of any kind into the muscle during the polio season because they fear that the needle may provoke a flare-up by a latent polio infection that otherwise would have done no harm. Dr. Salk did not feel that this objection was decisive, but would leave the verdict to local health officers...
Suspected Agent. More cautious was the University of Michigan's Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., grand evaluator of the 1954 Salk vaccine trials. He warned against indiscriminately beginning vaccination programs (i.e., giving the first of two shots) until the return of cold weather. Local health officers, he said, must weigh the risk of provoking polio against the number of cases they hope to prevent...
...Scheele and Shannon of P.H.S. gave short shrift to the Salk straight-line inactivation theory. It simply does not work that way in practice, they said: a minute quantity of live.virus may always remain in the vaccine. However, they hastened to add, the vaccine can be made so safe that the chances of its causing polio will be negligible compared with the protection it will offer against polio...