Poliomyelitis

Poliomyelitis. Until 1894 when Vermont reported 132 cases, poliomyelitis, also known as infantile paralysis, remained rare. Between 1905 and 1909, however, when the United States reported two‐thirds of the world's eight thousand cases, it became a peculiarly American epidemic. Although never a major factor in overall morbidity or mortality rates, polio by the 1930s had become one of America's most feared diseases because it tended to strike children and had no known prevention or cure. In 1909 pathologist Simon Flexner at New York's Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, building on pathologist Karl Landsteiner's work, had demonstrated that polio was caused by a virus, but full understanding eluded investigators.

In 1921, polio left thirty‐nine‐year‐old Franklin Delano Roosevelt partially paralyzed. Although Roosevelt hid the extent of his disability, he made Warm Springs, Georgia, a polio rehabilitation center and inspired the founding in 1937 of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The National Foundation, directed by Roosevelt's former law partner Basil O'Connor, became America's largest, most successful disease philanthropy. By 1945 its “March of Dimes” campaign had raised more than twenty million dollars.

During the 1930s and 1940s American scientists, funded by the National Foundation, made crucial contributions to polio research. The 1948 Foundation‐supported tissue‐culture experiments of John Enders, Frederick Robbins, and Thomas Weller at the Boston Children's Hospital, which won them a Nobel Prize in 1954, demonstrated that the virus could be grown in non‐neurological tissue—and gave University of Pittsburgh virologist Jonas Salk the means to develop the first safe and effective polio vaccine.

In 1954 the National Foundation organized the world's largest clinical trial, in which 1.8 million U.S. school children were injected with Salk's killed‐virus vaccine or a placebo. The Salk vaccine was widely administered thereafter, bringing a dramatic decline in the incidence of polio. In the late 1950s, Dr. Albert Sabin (1906–1993) at the University of Cincinnati developed an attenuated live‐virus vaccine that the Soviet Union tested in 1958. Between 1961 and 1998, Sabin's oral vaccine, which was riskier but more effective than Salk's, remained the officially recommended U.S. polio vaccine. As part of the worldwide effort to eliminate polio, the U.S. Public Health Service then began to reintroduce the Salk vaccine. After decades as a symbol of America's victory over infectious disease, polio won renewed scientific and public interest in the 1980s with the identification of postpolio syndrome, in which polio survivors experienced muscle weakness and fatigue thirty or forty years after the initial attack. Still largely unexplained, this condition spurred many “polios” to become active in the disability‐rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s.
See also Biological Sciences: Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945; Medicine: Since 1945; Public Health.

Bibliography

John R. Paul , A History of Poliomyelitis, 1971.
Jane S. Smith , Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, 1990.
Naomi Rogers , Dirt and Disease: Polio before FDR, 1992.
Nina Gilden Seavly et al. , A Paralyzing Fear: The Triumph over Polio in America, 1996.

Naomi Rogers