Word: salk
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Shift in Aim. Despite five years of intensive efforts to get everybody in the U.S. Salk-vaccinated (about 300 million shots have been injected), 91 million people still have not had any vaccine. And paralytic polio has been increasing for two years. From 2,500 cases in 1957 it went up to 3,700 in 1958 and 5,500 in 1959. Unaccountably, the disease has shifted its aim: young children, especially under two years old, are now the principal victims. They are concentrated in urban and. rural slums, among Negroes and Puerto Ricans. This is partly explained by the fact...
...Three doses of Salk vaccine are only 80% to 90% effective in conferring immunity, said two U.S. Public Health Service experts. Advocates of live-virus vaccines maintain that their preparations, taken in one or three doses, confer immunity in 90% or more of the vaccinated, as measured by laboratory tests of blood antibodies against polio viruses. But do the oral vaccines really give such a high proportional protection against paralysis? And are they safe? On these questions the scientists divided down the middle...
...purists, Johns Hopkins University's Dr. David Bodian said that there should be a clear showing, as in the Salk 1954 field trial, based on different paralysis rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated. This was exasperating to both the University of Cincinnati's Dr. Albert B. Sabin and Lederle Laboratories' Dr. Herald R. Cox, developers of two of three U.S. live vaccines. It is an impossible requirement, snapped Dr. Sabin, because by its very nature the oral, weakened virus is designed to multiply in the human digestive tract. It is bound to spread to unvaccinated contacts (especially close...
...under extensive trial in Miami (TIME, Feb. 29) and Minnesota. Even this brought a demurral. Said Biologies Standards' Dr. Roderick Murray: "No company has yet filed a complete application with all the required data." What he meant was that the Government, once burned when hasty licensing of Salk vaccine producers was followed by the disastrous Cutter incident (TIME, May 9 1955 et seq.}, is now twice shy about licensing an oral vaccine. Main concern is that the weakened viruses sometimes revert, in the human stomach and intestines, to a form that is more likely to cause paralysis...
Toward the Ideal. Many of the recorded failures of Salk vaccination (17% of paralysis victims last year had had three or more shots) were explained by Vaccinventor Jonas E. Salk himself. The commercial vaccine, he declared unequivocally, is only 50% effective (on the average) after a single shot. By simple arithmetic, he argued that two shots would be 75% effective, and three shots, 87.5%. Dr. Salk contrasted this with the efficacy of the hand-tooled vaccine made with craftsman care in his University of Pittsburgh laboratories: 90% effective after one shot, 99% after two, and 99.9% after three. Commercial vaccine...