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The History of the Polio Vaccine

Polio epidemics have crippled and killed people---mostly children---since before recorded history. At its worst---paralytic polio---the virus enters the central nervous system and can lead to paralysis and severe breathing problems. Before Jonas Salk developed a successful vaccine, about 25,000 children in the United States developed paralytic polio every year.

  1. Pre-Vaccine

    • Michael Underwood, a British physician, wrote the first clinical description of polio in 1789. In 1840 Jacob von Heine wrote an article that described the disease and noted that it seemed to involve the spinal cord. In Vermont, 132 cases of polio in 1894 caused the first epidemic of the disease in the United States. In 1908, two Austrian physicians identified the polio virus. In 1916, another large outbreak occurred in the United States. Isolation and quarantine were the only ways public health officials had of responding to the virus.

    Development

    • Work to develop a vaccine against the polio virus had two physicians, Maurice Brodie and John Kollmer, racing against each other to be the first to introduce it. The 1935 trials of the vaccines caused some cases of polio, some of which proved to be fatal. In 1835, President Franklin Roosevelt, a survivor of polio, established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and in 1938, Eddie Canter coined the term March of Dimes to encourage Americans to support the foundation.

    Treatment

    • A treatment for polio was developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny of Australia. The procedure involved hot-packing and stretching limbs ravaged by the disease. In 1942, the first Sister Kenny Institute opened and Kenny's treatment protocol became the standard for polio. Despite the treatment protocol, infection was still rampant and widespread epidemics continued to occur.

    Jonas Salk

    • Jonas Salk accepted a position at the medical laboratory founded by Sarah Mellon Scientific Foundation in 1947 and the following year the laboratory was awarded a grant for a polio virus typing project. Salk used tissue culture to cultivate and work with the virus. By 1952, a version of Salk's vaccine, using a killed polio virus, had proven successful in small trials. However in 1953, there were 35,000 new cases of polio in the United States.

    Success

    • In 1954, Salk's vaccines were tested in massive trials sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. More than 1.8 million children---called Polio Pioneers---took the vaccine, took a placebo or took neither. The success of the trials was announced in a press conference in 1955 and by 1957, after mass immunization began, the United States has only 5,600 new cases. In 1962, the Sabin oral vaccine came into use and by 1964, there were only 121 new cases of polio reported in the United States. In 1979, the last case of indigenous polio occurred in the United States. Since then, all cases have been vaccine-related or have been brought in from another county. Worldwide, there are six countries where polio continues to infect people. In 2005, there were 105 cases in Nigeria and Sudan.

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