Who invented poliomyelitis

Since the virus is easily transmitted, epidemics were commonplace in the first decades of the 20th century. The first major polio epidemic in the United States occurred in Vermont in the summer of , and by the 20th century thousands were affected every year.

Although children, and especially infants, were among the worst affected, adults were also often afflicted, including future president Franklin D. Roosevelt , who in was stricken with polio at the age of 39 and was left partially paralyzed. Roosevelt later transformed his estate in Warm Springs, Georgia, into a recovery retreat for polio victims and was instrumental in raising funds for polio-related research and the treatment of polio patients.

Salk, born in New York City in , first conducted research on viruses in the s when he was a medical student at New York University, and during World War II helped develop flu vaccines. In , he became head of a research laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh and in was awarded a grant to study the polio virus and develop a possible vaccine. By , he had an early version of his polio vaccine. Salk conducted the first human trials on former polio patients and on himself and his family, and by was ready to announce his findings.

This occurred on the CBS national radio network on the evening of March 25 and two days later in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Salk became an immediate celebrity. In , clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on 1.

In April , it was announced that the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began. Shortly thereafter, tragedy struck in the Western and mid-Western United States, when more than , people were injected with a defective vaccine manufactured at Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, California. Thousands of polio cases were reported, children were left paralyzed and 10 died. The incident delayed production of the vaccine, but new polio cases dropped to under 6, in , the first year after the vaccine was widely available.

In , an oral vaccine developed by Polish-American researcher Albert Sabin became available, greatly facilitating distribution of the polio vaccine.

The serum was made from blood donated by those who had survived a polio attack, although there was never proof of the serum's effectiveness. These huge metal cylinders regulate the breathing of people whose polio attacked their respiratory muscles. There was a rush to assemble more iron lungs to help keep people alive after a severe outbreak in The Ontario government paid to have 27 of these devices assembled in a six-week period.

Some women gave birth while confined in an iron lung and the Royal Canadian Air Force made emergency deliveries of these devices across the country. Iron lungs are still used in some countries.

A nasal spray designed to block the polio virus from entering the body was used on 5, Toronto children in After two rounds of treatments, the spray was abandoned because it did not prevent polio and actually caused a number of the children to lose their sense of smell. An estimated 11, people in Canada were left paralyzed by polio between and He also believed that it would be less dangerous than a live vaccine: if the vaccine contained only dead virus, then it could not accidentally cause polio in those inoculated.

One difficulty, however, was that large quantities of poliovirus were needed to produce a killed-virus vaccine because a killed virus will not grow in the body after administration the way a live virus will. In John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins had discovered that poliovirus could be grown in laboratory tissue cultures of non-nerve tissue earning them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in The work of Enders and his colleagues paved the way for Salk, for it provided a method of growing the virus without injecting live monkeys.

Salk developed methods for growing large quantities of the three types of polioviruses on cultures of monkey kidney cells. He then killed the viruses with formaldehyde.

When injected into monkeys, the vaccine protected them against paralytic poliomyelitis. In Salk began testing the vaccine in humans, starting with children who had already been infected with the virus. He measured their antibody levels before vaccination and then was excited to see that the levels had been raised significantly by the vaccine.

In a massive controlled field trial was launched, sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Almost two million U. In other areas of the country children who did not receive any vaccine were carefully observed. Accomplishing this required the assistance of the pharmaceutical industry, and well-known companies like Eli Lilly and Company, Wyeth Laboratories, and Parke, Davis and Company agreed to make the new vaccine. In the meantime a live-virus vaccine for polio was being developed by Albert Sabin.

Sabin, like many scientists of the time, believed that only a living virus would be able to guarantee immunity for an extended period. Sabin was born in in Bialystok, Russia now part of Poland. At the age of 15 he emigrated with his family to the United States. After Sabin graduated from high school in Paterson, New Jersey, his uncle agreed to finance his college education, provided that Sabin studied dentistry.

After two years preparing for dentistry at New York University, Sabin switched to medicine, having developed an interest in virology. In doing so he lost his financial support, but odd jobs and scholarships enabled him to continue his education.

While at medical school Sabin spent time researching pneumonia, developing an accurate and efficient method of determining its cause in individual cases—either pneumococcus or virus. He received his MD in and, after completing his internship, traveled to the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine in London to conduct research. A year later he returned to the United States, having accepted a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

There Sabin developed an interest in poliovirus. In he and a colleague were able to grow poliovirus in brain tissue from a human embryo.