An epidemic a generation ago
As we all hustle to get inoculated to avoid the danger of COVID-19, and read about its unfortunate fatalities, I think back to when I was young and the dreaded disease, until a vaccine was developed, was infantile paralysis, later called poliomyelitis, or just polio.
We all knew a few kids who had suffered the disease, and walked with crutches and had metal braces on their legs.
We were aware of kids who couldn’t breathe, and were in the hospital lying in a big casket-like thing called an iron lung.
And we were all aware that the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had caught polio when he was 39, had braces on his legs, used crutches and could walk only by shifting his weight from side to side.
One boy in our elementary school class got the disease. He had leg braces, but learned to play drums and grew up to become a drummer in local swing bands.
When I was about 20, a young fellow I knew was stricken. .He was already a talented artist, but was confined in an iron lung. His arms and hands were free, but, lying flat on his back, he could only make pencil drawings; ink or paint would dribble back on him.
I went to an art supply store, and the man there sold me something that had just been invented: Felt-tip pens. My friend could use them, and he happily made drawings. (He later, on crutches, was on the faculty of the Philadelphia University of the Arts.)
It was good to hear, 66 years ago this month, that polio had effectively been eliminated. More than two million American children had been inoculated with a vaccine created by Dr. Jonas Salk.
Salk had conducted his first human trials for years, and announced his findings on the CBS national radio network on the evening of March 26, 1953, and two days later in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Every source I could find on-line says that Salk announced the historic findings on a CBS program, but a lot of searching never found what radio program it was.
In 1954, clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on nearly two million American schoolchildren. In April 1955, it was announced that the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began.
New polio cases dropped to under 6,000 in 1957, the first year the vaccine was widely available.
Salk never patented his creation. When a reporter asked him who owned the patent, he said, “The people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
In 1962, an oral vaccine developed by Polish-American researcher Albert Sabin became available. He never patented his polio vaccine, either.
Abram Saperstein, who Americanized his name to Albert Sabin, was born in Poland in 1906, and emigrated with his family on 1921. In 1930, he became a citizen and changed his name to Sabin. He started out to be a dentist, but got interested in virology and changed majors at NYU.
He had a very varied career, in New York, Cincinnati, the U. S. Army, Cuba, Israel, South Carolina and Washington. He developed an anti-polio vaccine that was taken orally, rather than by injection. It is easier to administer than Salk’s, and is in use here and there.
I wonder if some scientist somewhere should get credit for being first to identify COVID-19?