- Person
- Albert Sabin
- Lived
- 1906–1993
- Field
- Virology
- From
- Polish-American
The story
By 1960 Albert Sabin's live oral polio vaccine had been proven abroad. Because the United States had not allowed large field trials after the 1955 Cutter incident, its effectiveness had been demonstrated in the Soviet Union, where about 77 million children were vaccinated between 1959 and 1961, and in other countries. But it had not yet been widely used in the United States, where the injected vaccine developed by Jonas Salk remained standard.
Sabin's home city became the place to show what it could do. He had worked at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and the Cincinnati Children's Hospital since 1939, and it was there that he had developed and tested the vaccine.
On Sunday, April 24, 1960, the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children's Hospital launched a campaign to vaccinate children in Cincinnati and surrounding Hamilton County with the world's first oral live-virus polio vaccine. The vaccine was handed out free of charge, with local pediatricians such as Mark Dine helping to give it. Within a short time about 180,000 local children had been vaccinated. The free distribution days became known as Sabin Sundays.
The mass immunisation techniques that Sabin and his associates pioneered stopped further outbreaks of polio in Cincinnati. The success helped lead to the vaccine being licensed in the United States, and the US Public Health Service licensed Sabin's strains for types 1 and 2 in 1961 and for type 3 in 1962. The vaccine was then distributed nationwide and during the 1960s replaced the injected vaccine as the country's vaccine of choice.
The campaign is still remembered in the city. In 2010 the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children's held a 50th anniversary celebration attended by Sabin's widow, Heloisa Sabin, with a display that included an early iron lung. The street on the medical campus between the College of Medicine and the hospital now bears the name Albert Sabin Way.
The model of a whole community turning out on one day to be vaccinated with drops, free of charge, later became central to the mass campaigns that helped drive polio out of most of the world.
Why it matters
Sabin Sundays showed that an entire community could be protected quickly and cheaply, a model for the mass campaigns that later drove polio out of most of the world.
About Albert Sabin
Białystok-born virologist whose cheap, oral polio vaccine, given on a sugar cube and never patented, became the backbone of the global drive to eradicate polio.
More about Albert Sabin
- Albert Sabin trained the scientist who unmasked RSVAlbert Sabin's Cincinnati laboratory trained Robert Chanock, his favourite “scientific son”, who later showed that RSV causes severe respiratory disease in young children.
- Albert Sabin gave his oral polio vaccine free of chargeAlbert Sabin developed the oral polio vaccine, cheap and easy to give on a sugar cube, and gave it free of charge without profiting from its sale.
- Albert Sabin showed polio begins in the gutBy studying the bodies of polio victims, Albert Sabin showed that the virus multiplies first in the intestine, an insight that shaped the oral vaccine he later created.
- A polio vaccine you could take on a sugar cubeAlbert Sabin's live oral polio vaccine was cheap, could be given as drops on a sugar cube, and protected the gut as well as the blood, so it stopped the virus spreading.
- Albert Sabin tested his polio vaccine on himself firstBefore asking anyone else to take his live oral polio vaccine, Albert Sabin swallowed it himself, and his family and colleagues were among the very first recipients.
- Albert Sabin fought tropical viruses for the US ArmyIn the Second World War Albert Sabin served on the Army's Neurotropic Virus Commission, studying dengue and sandfly fever and developing early vaccines and preventive measures.
- Sabin crossed the Iron Curtain to test his polio vaccineAt the height of the Cold War, Albert Sabin shared his vaccine strains with Soviet scientists, and about 77 million Soviet children were vaccinated in 1959–1961.
- Sabin's vaccine became the backbone of polio eradicationWhen the global drive to eradicate polio began in 1988, about 350,000 children a year were still paralysed. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine became the campaign's main tool.
Sources
- UC, Cincinnati Children's to Host 50th Anniversary Celebration of Sabin Sundays University of Cincinnati
- Albert Sabin Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.