Cure to polio who invented

The first member of his family to attend college, he earned his medical degree from the New York University School of Medicine in and became a scientist physician at Mount Sinai Hospital. In , Salk went to the University of Michigan on a research fellowship to develop an influenza vaccine.

He soon advanced to the position of assistant professor of epidemiology. With funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—now known as the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation—he began to develop the techniques that would lead to a vaccine to wipe out the most frightening scourge of the time: paralytic poliomyelitis. Salk administered the vaccine to volunteers who had not had polio, including himself, his lab scientist, his wife and their children. All developed anti-polio antibodies and experienced no negative reactions to the vaccine.

In , Salk began testing his inactivated polio vaccine IPV on a small number of former polio patients in the Pittsburgh area and on himself, his wife and their three sons. The initial results were promising, and he announced his success on the CBS national radio network on March 25, , according to History. He became an instant celebrity.

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. Roosevelt , who in was stricken with polio at the age of 39 and was left partially paralyzed. Roosevelt later transformed his estate in Warm Springs, Georgia, into a recovery retreat for polio victims and was instrumental in raising funds for polio-related research and the treatment of polio patients.

Salk, born in New York City in , first conducted research on viruses in the s when he was a medical student at New York University, and during World War II helped develop flu vaccines.

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!