Available Vaccines And Vaccination Campaigns
Because of widespread vaccination, polio was eliminated from the Western Hemisphere in 1994. Today, it continues to circulate in a handful of countries, with occasional spread to neighboring countries. Vigorous vaccination programs are being conducted to eliminate these last pockets. Polio vaccination is still recommended worldwide because of the risk of imported cases.
Vaccines For Adolescents: A New Generation Of Vaccines
Adolescents, like adults, were recommended to get tetanus boosters every 10 years most requiring their first booster dose around age 11. Other than this, however, most adolescents did not require additional vaccines unless they missed one in childhood. By 2005, vaccines specifically recommended for adolescents were only recommended for sub-groups based on where they lived or medical conditions that they had. However, a new group of vaccines became available in the latter part of the decade.
- New vaccines: Tdap, 2005, meningococcal conjugate , HPV , meningococcal serogroup B vaccine
- Additional recommendations for existing vaccines: HPV , intranasal influenza vaccine
- New versions of existing vaccines: HPV
- Discontinuation of vaccine: intranasal influenza vaccine
2000
Pneumococcus
Symptoms And Causative Agent
Polio is caused by one of three types of poliovirus, which are members of the Enterovirus genus.
In about 95% of all polio cases, the person has no symptoms at all. These are known as asymptomatic cases. The rest of polio cases can be divided into three types: abortive polio, non-paralytic polio, and paralytic polio.
Abortive polio: In these cases, polio is a mild illness, with viral-like symptoms such as fever, fatigue, headache, sore throat, nausea, and diarrhea.
Non-paralytic polio: These cases typically involve the symptoms of abortive polio, with additional neurological symptorms, such as sensitivity to light and neck stiffness.
Paralytic polio: The first signs of paralytic polio, after an initial period of viral-like symptoms, typically begin with loss of superficial reflexes and muscle pain or spasms. Paralysis, usually asymmetric, follows. Fewer than 1%-2% of people who contract polio become paralyzed. In most cases of paralytic polio, the patient recovers completely. However, for a certain number of people, paralysis or muscle weakness remains for life.
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The Human Side Of Nature
Jonas Salk was born in New York City, New York, United States , to an Orthodox Polish-Jewish immigrant family on 28 October 1914. His parents lacked the benefits of a formal education, so they actively encouraged Jonas and his siblings to focus on their studies. After completing high school, Jonas matriculated at the City College of New York, and became the first member in the family to obtain a college education. However, it was law, not science, that initially kindled his academic interest. While growing up, Salk showed little affinity for the didactic aspects of the natural sciences, but his words belied a deep-rooted respect for human biology. As a child, he wrote, I was not interested in human anatomy. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. Thats what motivates me. And in a way, its the human dimension that has intrigued me.
Jonas Salk’s Polio Vaccine Developed 65 Years Ago

SAN DIEGO A vaccination against polio developed by Jonas Salk was proven effective 65 years ago this week. Today, the race is on to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
Salk discovered the polio vaccination in 1955.
It was produced from the polio virus itself. Salk used formaldehyde to kill the virus before it was injected into patients.
Jonas’ vaccine was a killed version of the virus. If you followed the protocol correctly, you would have a dead virus. There was never any chance of anybody being infected by the vaccine, said Dr. Greg Lemke, a professor at Salk Institute in La Jolla.
Lemke worked with Salk during the final decade of Salks life.
Early problems with Salk’s polio vaccine came up when a California lab producing the vaccine failed to fully kill the virus.
Lemke said that is not an issue with modern vaccines because scientists do not inject the entire virus into patents. Instead, they will use proteins from the coronavirus virus to trigger an antibody response.
There is not the kind of risk that you had back in the day when you were injecting killed or weakened versions of entire viruses, said Lemke.
Because coronavirus is a new virus, Lemke said it’s going to take time — perhaps more than a year to develop a vaccine.
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Development Of Pv Vaccines
In 1935, Brodie tried an inactivated vaccine with 10% formalin suspension of PV taken from infected monkey spinal cord he tried it first on 20 monkeys, then on 3000 Californian children. The results were poor and additional human studies were never performed. In the same year, Kollmer tried a live attenuated virus consisting of a 4% suspension of PV from infected monkey spinal cord, treated with sodium ricinoleate. He used it on monkeys and then on several thousand children. The acute paralysis occurred in about 1/1000 vaccines shortly after administration and some cases were fatal.
The discovery that the various antigenic strains of PVs could be grouped into three distinct viral types and the propagation of the PV in vitro led to the development of the vaccines against poliomyelitis: the formalin-inactivated vaccine by Jonas Salk and the live-attenuated vaccines by Albert Sabin .
A Brief History Of Vaccination
The practice of immunisation dates back hundreds of years. Buddhist monks drank snake venom to confer immunity to snake bite and variolation was practiced in 17th century China. Edward Jenner is considered the founder of vaccinology in the West in 1796, after he inoculated a 13 year-old-boy with vaccinia virus , and demonstrated immunity to smallpox. In 1798, the first smallpox vaccine was developed. Over the 18th and 19th centuries, systematic implementation of mass smallpox immunisation culminated in its global eradication in 1979.
Louis Pasteurs experiments spearheaded the development of live attenuated cholera vaccine and inactivated anthrax vaccine in humans . Plague vaccine was also invented in the late 19th Century. Between 1890 and 1950, bacterial vaccine development proliferated, including the Bacillis-Calmette-Guerin vaccination, which is still in use today.
In 1923, Alexander Glenny perfected a method to inactivate tetanus toxin with formaldehyde. The same method was used to develop a vaccine against diphtheria in 1926. Pertussis vaccine development took considerably longer, with a whole cell vaccine first licensed for use in the US in 1948.
Viral tissue culture methods developed from 1950-1985, and led to the advent of the Salk polio vaccine and the Sabin polio vaccine. Mass polio immunisation has now eradicated the disease from many regions around the world
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Who Should Not Get Polio Vaccine
Tell the person who is giving the vaccine:
- If the person getting the vaccine has any severe, life-threatening allergies.If you ever had a life-threatening allergic reaction after a dose of IPV, or have a severe allergy to any part of this vaccine, you may be advised not to get vaccinated. Ask your health care provider if you want information about vaccine components.
- If the person getting the vaccine is not feeling well.If you have a mild illness, such as a cold, you can probably get the vaccine today. If you are moderately or severely ill, you should probably wait until you recover. Your doctor can advise you.
This information was taken directly from the Polio Vaccine Information Statement dated 7/20/2016.
The Polio Vaccine Rollout: How Does It Compare To Covid
by PHC Team | Jul 9, 2021
As the country is rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine, many people are concerned with how this vaccine was rolled out. How is this rollout different from other rollouts, such as the polio vaccine? Why did this vaccine come through so quickly? Here is the Polio rollout vs. the COVID rollout.
To compare the polio vaccination efforts to the COVID-19 way, we must first look at polios mass vaccination history. How does the polio vaccine work, what happened during the vaccine rollout, and how does this relate to our modern times? These are the questions this blog will answer.
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Years After Massive Polio Vaccine Trials Weve Come A Long Way
Dr. Jonas E. Salk and a nurse administer a polio vaccine to Pauline Antloger at Sunnyside school in … Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Bettmann Archive
A massive clinical trial of a promising new vaccine against polio ended on this day in 1955. By the end of the year, a program of childhood vaccination had started in the U.S., and new cases of the deadly, paralyzing disease dropped from 35,000 a year in 1952 to just a few hundred a year. 65 years later, medical researchers are racing to develop a vaccine for the 2019 novel coronavirus, and looking back at the polio vaccine underscores just how far weve come.
People started recognizing a disease called infantile paralysis in the 1800s, but it took until 1908 for identify the culprit: a virus we now know as poliovirus, discovered by Karl Landsteiner. That knowledge was small comfort when a polio epidemic struck the U.S. full force in 1916. Phillip Drinkers iron lung saved thousands of lives after its invention in 1928, but there seemed to be no way to protect the worlds children against the virus.
How Were The Inactivated And Oral Poliovirus Vaccines Made
OPV was made by weakening the three strains of poliovirus that caused disease by growing them in monkey kidney cells. Poliovirus that was grown in these cells was so “weakened” that, after it was swallowed, it induced an immune response but didn’t cause disease. OPV induced antibodies in the intestines and, therefore, because polio enters the body through the intestines, provided a “first line” of defense against polio. Unfortunately, on occasion, OPV reverted back to the natural form, causing paralysis.
IPV, unlike OPV, cannot reproduce itself and, therefore, cannot possibly revert back to natural polio. To make IPV, poliovirus is purified and killed with a chemical . IPV elicits antibodies in the bloodstream, not the intestines. It prevents the virus from traveling through the blood to the brain or spinal cord, thereby preventing paralysis. In a sense, because the vaccine induces antibodies in the bloodstream, and not the intestines, IPV induces a “second line” of defense against infection.
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Creating A Safe Vaccine Is One Thing Distributing It Fairly And Effectively Is An Altogether Different Challenge
The summer has presented an opportunity to catch up on podcasts. One of my favorite historians is Harvard professor Jill Lepore, author of the award-winning These Truths: A History of the United States. Lepore recently launched a new podcast series, The Last Archive, in which each episode explores a story from American history. In episode 6, Cell Strain, she chronicles how the polio vaccine was launched in the 1950s.
I clearly remember taking the cherry-flavored oral polio vaccine while in elementary school. Jonas Salk, the scientist who developed the vaccine, was a hero in my household. I also remember newsreels showing children in iron lungs. But other than the cherry-flavored vaccine, Jonas Salk, and iron lungs, I actually knew very little about the history of the polio vaccine.
Enter Jill Lepore with Cell Strain. In March 1953, Salk announced the development of a polio vaccine, after which it underwent two years of clinical trials. During that time, over 440,000 children were inoculated with the vaccine and another 210,000 children received a placebo 1.2 million children received no vaccination and served as a control group.
Despite the wrangling over polio vaccine distribution, four million children were vaccinated by July 1955 and a national health crisis was avoidedwithout much help from the federal government. Later in July, Hobby resigned from the government.
Government for the Future: Reflection and Vision for Tomorrows Leaders . His email address is .
The Last Time A Vaccine Saved America

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On the morning of April 12, 1955, an epidemiologist named Thomas Francis, Jr., took the stage of the Rackham Auditorium, at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Short and portly, in his mid-fifties, with a long face and a close-clipped mustache, Francis was there to deliver a ninety-minute lecture on the vaccine field trial he had just completed. The trial had evaluated the efficacy of the poliovirus vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, a former postdoc in Franciss lab.
An influenza researcher, Francis was known among scientists for his deft direction of complex flu-vaccine trials during the Second World War. He had taught Salk the techniques necessary for developing killed virus vaccinesshots in which large quantities of a virus are disabled in a formaldehyde solution, then introduced to the human immune system in order to prompt the production of antibodies. Today, no bioethics panel would allow Francis to run a safety trial for a vaccine developed by someone he knew so well. But rules were more relaxed back thenand, in any case, Franciss reputation was so sterling that, as the Salk biographer Jane S. Smith has written, even the most dedicated opponent of the new vaccine could never say a trial supervised by Francis was political, biased, or incomplete.
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The Schedule From 2011 To Present
Annual updates to both the childhood and adult immunization schedules offer guidance to healthcare providers in the form of new recommendations, changes to existing recommendations, or clarifications to assist with interpretation of the schedule in certain circumstances. The schedules are reviewed by committees of experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Important changes to the schedule:
- New vaccines: meningococcal serogroup B vaccine
- Additional recommendations for existing vaccines: HPV , intranasal influenza vaccine
- Discontinuation of vaccine: intranasal influenza vaccine
2020 | Recommended Vaccines
* Given in combination as DTaP** Given in combination as MMR
The Virus Research Laboratory And Poliovirus
In 1947 Salk accepted a position at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to establish a Virus Research Laboratory. He devoted his efforts to creating a first-class research environment and to publishing scientific papers on a variety of topics, including poliovirus. His work drew the attention of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis , and he was invited to participate in a research program sponsored by the foundation. He agreed and took up his assignment of typing polioviruses.
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Measles Mumps And Rubella
Measles, Mumps, and Rubella are viral infections that have each caused widespread, deadly disease outbreaks. Throughout the 1960s, individual vaccines were developed for each of them, but a decade later, they were combined into one.
Measles was the first of the three to receive its own vaccine in 1963, followed by mumps in 1967, and rubella in 1969. Two years later, in 1971, Maurice Hilleman of the Merck Institute of Therapeutic Research developed a combined vaccination that would provide immunity for all three viruses.
Hilleman was credited with creating the first measles and mumps vaccine, and began researching ways to incorporate a system of immunity for each virus. Using his previous research and a rubella vaccine developed by Stanley Plotkin in 1969, he created the first successful MMR vaccine in just two years.
According to the CDC, “One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella.”
“Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps.”
A Girls Impossible Dream In A World Of Men
Horstmann had a powerful fantasy as a child: she imagined herself as a doctor. Born in Spokane, Wash., in 1911, she grew up in San Francisco, where as a teenager she accompanied a physician friend of the family as he made his rounds through the local hospital. Earning her undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of California, San Francisco, Horstmann recalled that it had never crossed my mind that was in any way unusual for a woman. It was quite natural.
In 1941, Horstmann applied for a residency at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, where the chief of medicine, Hugh Morgan, M.D., had a strict policy of choosing only men. I got back a polite letter, saying no, she recalled in an unpublished interview with historian Daniel J. Wilson, Ph.D., of Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. I wasnt exactly crushed, but I was disappointed. Six months later, while considering an offer to enter private practice in San Francisco, she received a note from Morgan asking if Dr. Horstmann was still interested. She was, indeed. Somehow, Morgan had forgotten that Dr. Horstmann was a woman. Horstmann later learned from his secretary that when Morgan discovered his error, he all but went into shock. But we became friends, and I had a very good year there.
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Why Do We Use The Polio Shot And Not The Oral Polio Vaccine
In about 1 of every 2.4 million recipients, the live, weakened virus contained in the oral polio vaccine causes paralysis. The shot does not have this same side effect because, unlike the oral version, the shot contains killed virus that cannot replicate and, therefore, cannot cause paralysis.
Between 1961 and 1996, children in the United States received four doses of the oral vaccine. This changed beginning in 1997 and continued throughout 1999 when children typically received two doses of the shot followed by two doses of the oral vaccine. Since that time, infants have received four doses of the shot.
Many other countries continue to use the oral polio vaccine because it is more economical and easier to administer, allowing more people to get the vaccine. It also provides better community immunity.