Word: salk
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...American Medical Association has consistently backed Salk vaccine as the most effective means of preventing paralytic poliomyelitis. Last week in seeming contradiction, the A.M.A. Journal printed a judgment that "much of the Salk vaccine used in the U.S. has been worthless" - a charge that could snarl plans to get millions of Americans inoculated before polio begins its 1961 northward march with advancing summer. The Scripps-Howard newspapers headlined the statement, and Congressman Kenneth Roberts of Alabama urged an investigation...
...Journal's seeming switch came on its "Questions and Answers" page, where it printed an inquiry from an anonymous Wisconsin doctor asking about the value of Salk shots. To provide an expert answer, the Journal selected Dr. Herbert Ratner, health commissioner of Oak Park, Ill., who has been attacking the Salk vaccine ever since it was released in 1955. Ratner wrote that it is "generally recognized" that Salk vaccine is ineffective, because it is "an unstandardized product of an unstandardized process...
...facts are that some Salk shots have been worthless because the vaccine lost its potency with age, or because manufacturers, determined to make it safe, overdid the job of inactivating the virus. Despite this, overall effectiveness of Salk vaccine in preventing paralytic polio has ranged statistically from 75% to 90%. As Dr. Jonas E. Salk retorted: "The continued occurrence of polio is not due primarily to failure of the vaccine, but to failure to use it." But most authorities admit that for fuller protection, the U.S. needs a more potent vaccine, probably the Sabin oral type, which should be available...
...including spokesmen for 28 public-health agencies and similar groups) even to discuss the easily swallowed, live-virus vaccine, which can be administered in candy form. His argument: nobody knows when it will be available, and the public, confused by talk of the two, may neglect to get the Salk shots. When Dr. John B. Johnson of the National (Negro) Medical Association contrasted the slow U.S. pace of oral vaccine development with Russia's high-speed drive,* Dr. Sabin snapped: "It requires leadership to get these things done. We simply need leadership." Dr. Robert N. Barr, representing state health...
...this acrid atmosphere, the committee could only play it safe. It recommended immediate, intensified efforts to get Salk shots into young children and young adults, the two most vulnerable age groups. Dr. Sabin won a grudging endorsement: "The PHS should continue to make every effort to encourage the early production and ready availability of an oral polio vaccine." Best estimates were that it would not be ready much before next winter-too late to take effect in the peak polio months...