Polio Vaccine For The First Time Given To Children

Children infected with polio in 1952 in the US (Photo: Boston Children's Hospital Archive)

JAKARTA - Decades ago, polio was one of the most feared diseases in the United States (US). As the weather warms up every year, the panic over polio increases even as late summer is nicknamed "polio season".

Many things are being done to prevent polio transmission. Many public swimming pools were closed. In addition, many cinemas also make regulations so that visitors do not sit close together. Insurance companies began offering polio insurance for newborns.

The most famous victim of polio was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a young politician. He contracted polio in 1921, the disease spread rapidly, leaving his legs permanently paralyzed. In the late 1940's, the March of Dimes, a grassroots organization was founded with President Roosevelt's help to find a way to defend against polio.

Illustration (Pixabay)

In 1952, nearly 60,000 children were infected with polio; thousands of people were paralyzed and more than 3,000 died. The hospital set up a special unit with iron lung machines to keep polio victims alive.

But the nightmare faded away. On February 23, 1954, for the first time, children received the polio vaccine. The children are students of Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. They received the first injection of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.

Illustration (Pixabay)

Polio is a frightening contagious disease and it seems impossible to stop. This disease attacks the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous system. Polio also causes muscle breakdown, paralysis and death. Even as treatment improved rapidly in the first half of the 20th century in the Western world, polio was still raging, affecting mostly children and sometimes adults as well.

Reporting from History, Sunday, February 23, Jonas Salk, who is the head of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, found that polio has as many as 125 types and three basic types. Salk found that the cure must be able to combat these three basic types.

By growing samples of the polio virus and then deactivating or "killing" the virus by adding a chemical, Salk developed its vaccine, which can be injected into patients without causing infection.

After the mass inoculation began in 1954, everyone admired the vaccine's high polio cure rate of around 60-70 percent. Once it was determined that all previous cases of polio had appeared due to the wrong vaccine, the standard for the production of the new vaccine was raised.

By August 1955, about 4 million polio vaccine shots had been given. Polio cases in the US fell from 14,647 in 1955 to 5,894 in 1956, and in 1959 some 90 countries also used the vaccine invented by Salk.

The polio vaccine was later developed by Albert Sabin. He developed the polio vaccine using live attenuated viruses and the vaccine is used orally instead of being injected. Such a vaccine was licensed in 1962 and is more popular than Salk's, because it is cheaper and easier for people to take because it does not need to be injected.

Although there is no cure for polio, the use of vaccines has succeeded in eliminating the polio epidemic in the United States. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), polio cases have decreased by 99 percent and are only present in the world's poorest and most marginalized countries. WHO hopes to eradicate the disease by ensuring that every child gets the polio vaccine.