50 years after vaccine, polio almost gone

Polio — a disease for which Dr. Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine, here at Pitt — may… Polio — a disease for which Dr. Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine, here at Pitt — may be a thing of the past. Tommy Thompson, the United States secretary of Health, was guardedly optimistic about eradicating the virus, which used to afflict thousands, by next year, according to an Associated Press report.

This news comes almost fifty years after the vaccine was first developed — then field-tested on 1,800,000 schoolchildren — and found successful, as reported in The Pitt News on April 13, 1955.

Like small pox, polio, in most countries, is not a public health concern anymore. Yet approximately 1,000 cases are reported worldwide each year, according to Thompson, and these might be the hardest to eliminate.

Polio’s grave effects can be seen not only in Thompson’s and other’s efforts to vaccinate every human on earth, but also in the language in which contemporary news reports described the first vaccine. Reports of its success called the vaccine “the end of half a century’s work and a victory over one of mankind’s most dread diseases,” according to the same Pitt News article.

Pitt prides itself on being a top-notch research institution, and Dr. Salk’s vaccine shows that innovation comes from investing in ideas — with proper funding — and can occur anywhere, from the log cabin that stands on the Cathedral of Learning’s lawn to the imminent Biomedical Tower 3. When news, especially Pitt- and Pittsburgh-related news, seems to focus on what’s wrong, it’s important to remember what the University did right.

How many of us think about why Salk Hall is named what it is? It’s the building where Dr. Salk conducted his research. How many of us think regularly about the other innovations for which Pitt, and Pittsburgh, are partially responsible? Pittsburgh, after all, is not just ketchup and steel.

And while good news about an end to polio — with empirical evidence that incidences of the disease are decreasing — spreads across the globe like so much Heinz, it’s important to remember that, with all of what’s going wrong, occasionally, things go right.

In light of other diseases, such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, which claim millions of lives every year, it would be utterly foolhardy to declare humans victors over disease. As a 1955 report stated, this innovation, teamed with a genuine worldwide effort to end suffering, helped enormously. “There can be no doubt that humanity can pull itself up by its own bootstraps and protect its children from the insidious invasion of this … disease.”