Development of the Polio Vaccine...and Its Aftereffects
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In the 1950's North America was still haunted by a disease which had been paralyzing and killing children for 50 years. Polio is an infectious disease that strikes children under the age of three and causes paralysis, which is almost always permanent. In the most severe cases polio can lead to death by asphyxiation. Throughout the 40's and 50's large epidemics caused panic every summer in the industrialized world. At that time, children with polio were immobilized inside 'iron lungs' huge metal cylinders that operated like a pair of bellows to regulate their breathing and keep them alive. On April 12, 1955 Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was first licensed for public use in the U.S. In the years afterwards 90 million Americans were vaccinated in the largest mass vaccination campaign ever. Polio virtually disappeared from the continent and Jonas Salk became a hero. But not long after, 260 children who were vaccinated with Salk's vaccine became sick. Eleven of them died. An investigation showed that some lots of the vaccine were defective and confidence in it was shaken. Two scientific greats, Dr. Hilary Koprowski, director of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, and Dr. Albert Sabin, a physician at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, raced to replace the Salk vaccine. Dr. Cecil Fox, a pathologist at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases remembers that it was an intense competition. Cecil Fox: "You have these two conflicted individuals who were working towards the same goal. They were willing to go and take subjects who may or may not have been informed of what they were doing. They were willing to go to the back side of the moon if it meant that they could find out whether or not they had a viable product."
Both Sabin and Koprowski's vaccines were derived from monkey organs. They needed to test them in large, non-immunized populations groups, no longer available in North America. Sabin traveled to the U.S.S.R. and vaccinated more than 6 million people in Latvia, Estonia and Kazakhstan between 1958 and 1959. No AIDS cases emerged in the U.S.S.R. where Sabin did his testing. (see Note, below) Koprowski moved his study to the Belgian Congo which had one of Africa's more modern health care infrastructures at the time. Between 1956 and 1960 more then 1 million African people were 'encouraged' to receive Koprowski's vaccine called CHAT. Sabin analyzed Koprowski's vaccine in 1958 and found it be be 'unstable and contaminated by an unknown virus'. He told Koprowski about his discovery and went then went public with his findings. On May 5 1960 Sabin's vaccine, which was deemed more reliable, was chosen to replace Salk's. Koprowski had lost the race to develop the next polio vaccine.
The allegation that Koprowski's CHAT vaccine could have been the source
of the AIDS epidemic first surfaced in 1992. An article by Tom Curtis a
freelance journalist writing for Rolling Stone
The Origin of Aids
shook the scientific community. Cecil Fox: "There was a lot of concern that it was written by a person who was a professional journalist (not a scientist) and they were afraid that people would no longer immunize their children against polio."
Curtis had claimed that the CHAT vaccine was contaminated by a virus that came from the African Green Monkey. But he was mistaken because the Green Monkey does not carry SIV, HIV's predecessor, and his findings were discredited. Dr. Hilary Koprowski sued the Rolling Stone and Tom Curtis for defamation. The magazine published a 'clarification', "we never wished to suggest that it has been scientifically proven that Koprowski is the father of AIDS." Rolling Stone spent one million dollars in legal fees and damages Broadcast June 30, 2004 See also: Origin of AIDS
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