Government in Action: Eradicating Polio

In the early part of the 20th century, polio ravaged America. Caused by a communicable virus, polio can devastate the central nervous system and lead to paralysis that makes breathing and walking difficult. Many young victims spent long periods of time encased in metal tubes, known as iron lungs, which helped them to breathe. Others were consigned to leg braces to help them walk. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was America’s most famous polio patient.

In 1952, an epidemic of polio was spreading through the nation, killing 3,145 people and leaving more than 21,000 with some form of paralysis. With financial support from the March of Dimes, which had gathered gifts to fight polio from millions of Americans, medical researcher Dr. Jonas Salk was feverishly seeking to develop a vaccine.

By 1954, he had a vaccine the medical community felt was safe and effective and ready for clinical trials. Over the next few months, one of the largest and most expensive clinical trials in the history of medicine began: more than 600,000 American children were given the vaccine and a million more observed as a control group. More than 20,000 physicians, 64,000 school personnel and 200,000 volunteers carried out the massive trial. On April 12, 1955 – the tenth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s death and 59 years ago today – the results were announced: the vaccine worked, the scourge of polio was about to end.

The federal government quickly licensed the vaccine, and oversaw its production in six pharmaceutical plants and, with strong backing from the March of Dimes, set about getting the vaccine to every child in the United States. Within a year, polio cases had fallen by half. For his part, Salk made nothing more than his salary. When asked why he never patented the vaccine, he told a television interviewer, “There is no patent, could you patent the sun?”

Seven years later, Dr. Albert Sabin, a Polish immigrant, developed a new oral polio vaccine that delivered longer-lasting results. By 1964, less than a decade after Salk’s break-through, just 121 cases of polio were reported in the United States; a decade after that the disease was all but eliminated within the country.

In recent years, the U.S. government has helped lead the global effort to eradicate polio, internationally. Between 1988 and 2012, global polio cases have fallen from 350,000 to just 213.

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