TIIE BIGGEST PUBLIC IIEALTH EXPERIMENT EVER: The 1954 Field Trial of the Salk Poliomyelitis Vaccine
نویسنده
چکیده
THE LARGEST and most expensive medical experiment in history was carried out in 1954. Well over a million young children participated, and the immediate direct costs were over 5 million dollars. The experiment was carried out to assess the effectiveness, if any, of the Salk vaccine as a protection against paralysis or death from poliomyelitis. The study was elaborate in many respects, most prominently in the use of placebo controls (children who were inoculated with simple salt solution) assigned at random (that is, by a carefully applied chance process that gave each volunteer an equal probability of getting vaccine or salt solution) and subjected to a double-blind evaluation (that is, an arrangement under which neither the children nor the physicians who evaluated their subsequent state of health knew who had been given vaccine and who got the salt solution). The determination to mount a major research effort to eradicate polio arose in no small part from the involvement of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who' was struck down by polio when a successful young politician. His determination to overcome his paralytic handicap and the commitment to the fight against polio made by Basil O'Connor, his former law partner, enabled a great deal of attention, effort, and money to be expended on the care and rehabilitation of polio victims and—in the end, more importantly—on research into the causes and prevention of the disease.
منابع مشابه
Experimental study of interference between Pertussis antigens and Salk Poliomyelitis vaccine
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Poliomyelitis Vaccine
The Epidemiology of poliomgelitis has been investigated in our country Pasteur Institute; the incidence of Poliomgelitis, after the age of 4 years i's rare, in Iran. Passive antibody of maternal origin do not interfere with production of active antibody after immunization. Inactivated Polio Vaccine (salk) has been effective in reducing the incidence of poliomgelitis by approximately 90 per ...
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Large scale programs for the control of poliomyelitis through the use of active immunization can be said to have started, both in the United States and elsewhere, in 1955. This step marked the end of a 40-year period in which experimental efforts to vaccinate against poliomyelitis had been repeatedly tried. As early as 1910, Dr. Simon Flexner, the Director of the Rockefeller Institute, and at t...
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1. D. Bodian, Am. J. Hyg. 55, 414 (1952). 2. D. M. Horstmann, Proc. Soc. Exptl. BRiol. Med. 79, 417 (1952). 3. , R. W. McCollum, A. D. Mascola, J. Exptl. Med. 99, 355 (1954). 4. D. Bedian and R. S. Paffenbarger, Jr., Amiz. J. Hyg. 60, 83 (1954). 5. D. Bodian, Ibid. 57, 81 (1953). 6. This work was aided by a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. 7. J. F. Enders, T. H. Welle...
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