- Person
- Jonas Salk
- Lived
- 1914–1995
- Field
- Medicine
- From
- American
The story
Polio was one of the most feared diseases in mid-twentieth-century America. Outbreaks returned almost every year, and the virus left many children paralysed for life. In the early 1950s the United States recorded more than 25,000 cases a year, and in 1952 an epidemic of about 58,000 cases killed some 3,200 people. Parents had no way to protect their families, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, raised money from ordinary Americans through its March of Dimes to fund a solution.
Jonas Salk, working at the University of Pittsburgh, developed a vaccine from killed poliovirus, and in 1954 it was tested in a national field trial involving more than 1.8 million schoolchildren. On 12 April 1955, the tenth anniversary of Roosevelt's death, the results were announced: Jonas Salk's vaccine was safe and effective. Salk was hailed as a miracle worker, and a rush to vaccinate began across the United States.
According to the Salk Institute, in the two years before the vaccine was widely available the average number of polio cases in the country was more than 45,000. By 1962 that number had fallen to 910. Other counts tell the same story: annual cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 in 1957 and 161 in 1961.
Salk's injected vaccine was later joined by Albert Sabin's oral vaccine, which came into commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after Salk's vaccine was released, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States; the last cases caused by wild virus spreading within the country came in 1979.
Salk's vaccine also spread abroad quickly, reaching about 90 countries by 1959. An enhanced version of the injected vaccine was licensed in the United States in 1987 and is still the vaccine used there, and the global eradication campaign launched in 1988 has helped cut reported cases from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.
Why it matters
Salk's vaccine spared hundreds of thousands of children from paralysis and began the global campaign that has brought polio close to eradication.
About Jonas Salk
Virologist who developed the first successful polio vaccine; refused to patent it, calling the breakthrough a gift to the world.
More about Jonas Salk
- Jonas Salk chose not to patent the polio vaccineAsked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, Jonas Salk answered: 'Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?'
- Jonas Salk founded the Salk Institute in 1963In 1963 Jonas Salk opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, a research centre designed by architect Louis Kahn.
- Salk helped develop a flu vaccine for the US ArmyBefore polio, Jonas Salk worked with Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan on an army-commissioned influenza vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases.
- Salk's vaccine was tested in a trial of 1.8 million childrenThe 1954 field trial of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine involved over 1.8 million schoolchildren, 20,000 physicians and 220,000 volunteers. The children were called Polio Pioneers.
- Salk spent his final years seeking an AIDS vaccineFrom the mid-1980s until his death in 1995, Jonas Salk worked on a vaccine and immune therapy against HIV, applying the killed-virus approach he had used against polio.
- Salk tested his polio vaccine on himself and his familyBefore the national trial, Jonas Salk gave his killed-virus polio vaccine to volunteers including himself, his wife and their children. All developed antibodies with no ill effects.
- Salk called vaccinating every child a moral commitmentFor the rest of his life Jonas Salk campaigned for the vaccination of all children against disease, which he described as a moral commitment.
Sources
- About Jonas Salk Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Jonas Salk Wikipedia
- Polio vaccine 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.