Sixty years ago, at about the time you’re reading this, church bells began to ring across the United States. Cars honked their horns. Reporters rushed to phones, and people ran to the corner to buy newspapers and into barbershops to listen to their radios.
It was not a holiday, or a war, that caused the tumult: It was a scientific result. At a conference in Michigan, researchers had announced the first successful vaccine against polio.
If it is difficult now to understand why that was so momentous, credit the vaccine announced that day, and another one revealed soon after. In the United States, polio killed or paralyzed thousands of children every summer. In 1952, the worst year on record, it attacked 58,000 American kids, closing pools and movie theaters, turning streets into ghost towns as families fled crowded cities for sparsely settled summer colonies where they imagined they would be more safe. Around the world, hundreds of thousands more every year were mowed down by it; in societies with few resources to treat the illness or support the disability that followed, they faced a lifetime of mistreatment and poverty.
The vaccine announcement came from an unprecedented partnership of researchers in multiple countries, led by Dr. Jonas Salk and funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the “March of Dimes.” The partners had tested the formula on more than 1.8 million children. In Ann Arbor, the head of the trial, Dr. Thomas Francis of the University of Michigan, declared the vaccine was “safe, effective and potent.” Vaccinations started within days.
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Read full, original article: A “Polio Warrior” Recounts Decades of Struggle Toward Eradication
