Polio Flashcards
In 1952, the US experienced a Polio epidemic that saw how many Americans come down with the disease and how many of those become paralyzed?
58,000 Americans were infected with Polio and of those, 21,000 were paralyzed.
In what year did Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine begin entering human trials?
1954
Bernice Eddy, PhD, who worked in the NIG division that was at the time the gatekeeper of the U.S. Vaccine market, isolated live polio virus from three lots of the polio vaccine that Jonas Salk had submitted for human trials in 1954 and reported to her bosses what findings that were then ignored prior to the licensing of Salk’s vaccine in April 1955?
Bernice Eddy had injected mo keys with the suspect vaccine and found that it paralyzed some of them. After the vaccine was pulled from the market due to causing polio and deaths in many recipients, Eddy was pulled off polio vaccine work despite her warnings to her bosses.
After Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine licensed in April of 1955 was used for mass vaccinations in the US, what was the result?
192 people were paralyzed and 10 people died. The government was forced to temporarily recall all polio vaccine until mandated changes were put in place for the manufacturing of the vaccine.
In 1958 a scientist at the drug company Eli Lilly named Robert Hull had begun cataloging each new simian virus that was discovered in monkey kidney cells used to produce vaccines (including Jonas Salk’s Polio vaccine), classifying it according to cellular damage that it caused in monkey kidney cell cultures. He reported 18 new simian viruses had been discovered in just the previous two years, being quoted saying…
“As long as primary monkey kidney cultures are used in the production and testing of virus vaccines, the problem of simian virus contamination will remain.”
Since the introduction of Jonas Salk’s killed polio vaccine, the Incidence of Polio in the US had fallen from nearly 25 cases per 100,000 in 1955 to what numbers by 1960?
5 per 100,000. However, pockets of polio stubbornly persisted, particularly in poor communities.
In the race to win a U.S. License for the first live polio vaccine, who were the three scientists competing to do so?
Albert Sabin, Herald Cox, and Hilary Koprowski
In the race to win a U.S. License for the first live polio vaccine, Hilary Koprowski had tested his live polio vaccine on more than 300,000 people in central Africa, mainly in the Belgian Congo. At a June 1960 conference, Maurice Hilleman who headed vaccine research at Merck shocked everyone with news of unexpected findings by Ben Sweet - one of Hilleman’s scientists. What were the findings?
A new, invisible simian virus contaminating Albert Sabin’s, and likely Cox’s and Koprowski’s live vaccines too, that differed from other known simian viruses in that it didn’t declare itself by damaging cultures of the cells. Instead, it sat quietly, leaving monkey cells looking and acting normal in their bottles. It was impossible to detect. But when Sweet exposed the kidney cells from the African green (or grivet) monkey, to fluids from rhesus monkey kidney cells - cells used to produce polio vaccine - the African green kidney cells sickened and died. The dormant virus in the rhesus monkey kidney cells had passed to the African green monkey cells and those cells to bloat and be riddled with holes. (The virus was also discovered in cynomolgus monkeys, cells from which were also used in the production of polio vaccine).
