Word: salk
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...good way to assess the great figures of medicine is by how 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...
...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...
Undeterred by the skeptics, the medical pioneer forged ahead and joined forces with a private company to develop his treatment. Now Salk, 80, may get a chance to prove he has one more medical miracle up the sleeve of his lab coat. Last week an expert advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration recommended that the agency allow Salk to test his AIDS vaccine on 5,000 volunteers. If the FDA agrees, Salk's preparation would be the first AIDS vaccine to undergo a large-scale trial...
Unlike traditional vaccines, which are designed to prevent infection, Salk's new treatment is given to people who are already infected with hiv. Once every three months, they receive a shot of vaccine, manufactured by the Immune Response Co. of Carlsbad, California, that is supposed to boost their flagging immune system and decrease the amount of virus circulating in the blood. But new research, reported last month by teams led by Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City and Dr. George Shaw of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, suggests that this...
Then why did the FDA panel vote for wider testing? Clearly, Salk himself was a big selling point. "He has a reputation among some scientists as a god," says one top AIDS researcher. "He's a powerful advocate, and they find it very hard to turn him down." The committee may also have had a hard time saying no to the AIDS patients who participated in the early pilot programs. They fear that if the FDA does not expand the trial, they will no longer receive the shots. And many are convinced that the treatments are helping. Mike Slattery...