Immunization from a photographic perspective: the 1961 polio trial in Nova Scotia.

E356 CMAJ, April 19, 2011, 183(7) © 2011 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors Fifty years ago a team of doctors and nurses from the Nova Scotia Department of Health and Dalhousie University conducted what became known as the Wedgeport Polio Trial in which the oral trivalent Sabin vaccine was administered to an entire community in Southwest Nova Scotia. The results of the trial were published in this journal in 1962; 50 years on the trial is part of Canadian medical history. As CMAJ celebrates one hundred years of publishing medical research in Canada it is interesting to look at the trial from the perspective of the distinguished photojournalist, Bob Brooks, who accompanied the researchers on their rounds in March 1961. Canada experienced great losses from paralytic polio epidemics in the 20th century. By 1934, almost half of Canada’s disabled population could be linked to polio and in 1953, the year of the worst outbreak in Canadian history, almost 9000 cases were reported. While the injectable Salk vaccine helped control some of the epidemic, it did not stop all outbreaks, and more aggressive polio immunization campaigns were needed. Connaught Medical Laboratories, now Sanofi Pasteur, had been developing the trivalent Sabin vaccine (available at the time only in the United States), and this prompted field studies in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia, which were pivotal in encouraging the licensing of the Sabin vaccine in Canada. In Nova Scotia, Dr. C.E. van Rooyen, professor of bacteriology and associate provincial bacteriologist at Dalhousie University, and Dr. Vernon Rideout, director of the Western Nova Scotia Health Unit of the Provincial Department of Health, headed the team destined for Wedgeport, an Acadian fishing community in Yarmouth County. Wedgeport (with the neighbouring community of Comeau’s Hill) Immunization from a photographic perspective: the 1961 polio trial in Nova Scotia