polio vaccine :: essays research papers

Poliomyelitis (shortened to polio) has been around for thousands ofyears, and in that respect is comfort no cure, but at the peak of its devastation in the joinStates, Dr. Jonas Salk introduced a way to prevent it. Polio attacks the nervecells and some measures the exchange nervous system, causing muscle wasting,paralysis, and even death. The disease, whose symptoms are flu like, stuckby and large children, and in the first half of the 20th century the epidemics of poliowere proper more devastating. Salk, patch working at the Virus Research science laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, developed a polio vaccine, and themedical trials to prove its intensity and safety are still being analyzed.Fifty years past the largest medical experiment in history took place to turn up Salks poliomyelitis vaccine. Close to two million children across theUnited States and Canada were come to in the trial, which was administeredby the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP ), in like manner known as theMarch of Dimes. The foundation, created in 1938 by President Franklin D.Roosevelt (a polio victim) and his law partner Basil OConnor. Across theUnited States, 623,972 shoal children were injected with the vaccine or aplacebo, using a double trick technique in which neither recipient noradministrator knew which one there were getting. The results, announced in1955, showed good statistical evidence that Jonas Salks killed viruspreparation was 80-90% effective in preventing paralytic poliomyelitis.The statistical designing employ in the experiment was singular, promptingcriticism. Eighty four test areas in eleven states used a textbook model in arandomized, blinded design all participating children in the first tether gradesof school (ages 6-9) received injections of either vaccine for placebo andwere observed. At the same time though, 127 test areas in 33 states used anobserved pull strings design where the participating children in the secondgrad e received injections of vaccine, no placebo was given, and children in allthree grades were then observed for the duration of the polio season. The useof the dual protocol illustrates both the power and the limitations ofrandomized clinical trials. The control trials with the placebo were importantto define the vaccine as the product of scientific medicine, while the observedtrials were done to maintain public support for the vaccine.In 1953, Salk presented his tests of a polio vaccine to the ImmunizationCommittee, the scientific advisory military commission for the NFIP. The test resultsseemed promising to Basil OConnor, as the children had shown no ill doand the levels of polio antibodies in their blood had risen. However, severalof the senior virologist on the committee questioned the relation of antibodies