Who invented polio drops

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.

Today, there are just a handful of polio cases in the United States every year. He died in La Jolla, California , in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Following an anonymous tip, police enter a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb of San Diego, California, and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased—21 women and 18 men of varying ages—were all found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike In a ceremony at the White House, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign a historic peace agreement, ending three decades of hostilities between Egypt and Israel and establishing diplomatic and commercial ties.

What is polio? Transmitted via the faecal-oral route, poliovirus invades the central nervous system and as it multiplies, destroys the nerve cells that activate muscles, causing irreversible paralysis in hours. There is no cure for polio, but there are safe, effective vaccines which, given multiple times, protect a child for life. If sufficient numbers are immunized against polio, the virus is unable to find susceptible children to infect, and dies out.

It is likely that polio has caused paralysis and death for most of human history. The oldest clearly identifiable reference to polio is an Egyptian stele pictured , depicting a man with a withered leg, leaning on a staff, which is more than 3, years old. When the World Health Assembly passes its resolution to eradicate polio, the disease is endemic in countries.

Over the next 25 years, more than 2. Most of Europe is now polio-free. The first large-scale clinical trial of Salk's vaccine began in and enrolled more than 1 million participants.

It was the first vaccine trial to implement a double-blind, placebo-controlled design — now a standard requirement in the modern era of vaccine research, according to Arnold S.

Monto's review published in the journal Epidemiological Reviews. The scientist leading the vaccine trial, Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr. Later that same day, the U. Related: 20 of the worst epidemics and pandemics in history.

Murrow asked Salk who owned the vaccine. Can you patent the sun? Only a few weeks later, reports began surfacing of children experiencing paralysis after receiving the vaccine. More than new polio cases were traced back to batches of the vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories, according to the CDC.

The batches had contained live, active strains of poliovirus. The U. Surgeon General halted all polio vaccine administration until all manufacturers could be investigated and verified for safety. At the time, there had been little government regulation over vaccine manufacturers, but that quickly changed after what is now known as the Cutter Incident.

Since then, not a single case of polio has ever been attributed to the Salk vaccine. While Salk was developing his inactivated polio vaccine, his professional rival, virologist Dr. Albert Sabin at the University of Cincinnati, was working on a vaccine made with active, but weakened, virus.

Sabin opposed Salk's vaccine design and considered an inactivated virus vaccine to be dangerous. By , Sabin had created an oral live-virus vaccine for all three types of poliovirus that was approved for use by the U. Sabin's version was cheaper and easier to produce than the Salk vaccine, and it quickly supplanted the Salk vaccine in the U.

In , Sabin donated his vaccine strains to the World Health Organization WHO , which greatly increased the vaccine's availability in low-income countries.