Medicine: D-Day Against Polio

Hundreds of thousands of second-grade schoolchildren, averaging seven years old, will give the answer next year to the most urgent and immediate question confronting medical scientists: Can the vaccine developed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Dr. Jonas E. Salk (TIME, Feb. 9) halt the ravages of polio?

Under plans announced this week by Basil O’Connor, president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Dr. Salk will widen his testing program in western Pennsylvania to cover more than 5,000 children by midwinter. Then mass field trials on a nationwide basis will get under way on Feb. 8 in a county (still to be chosen) in one of the Southern states where polio strikes early and often. Thereafter, as fast as can be, inoculation teams will get to work in 200 or more counties until 500.000 to 1,000,000 children have been vaccinated. The work must be finished by early June, beginning of the epidemic polio season in most of the U.S.

Local health officers will be in charge of the program in their areas. Local doctors will give the shots with chapters of the National Foundation supplying volunteer clerical and nursing help. No child will be vaccinated without written consent of parents or guardians. Each child selected will receive three injections, each of 1 cc. of triple vaccine in water, the first two shots a week apart, the third (booster) shot a month later. All shots will be given in the arm and should be virtually painless.

Second-graders were chosen for the tests because the incidence of polio is usually greatest around their age group. For “controls,” to judge whether the second-graders receive substantial protection against paralytic polio, the foundation’s researchers will check the experience of first and third-graders in the same counties. They will also check that of the brothers and sisters of the children inoculated, and the polio figures of second-graders who do not get the shots.

It will be 1955 before results of the $7,500,000 test can be accurately judged, said O’Connor. The vaccine will be made in Dr. Salk’s laboratories, and by pharmaceutical manufacturers using his method. It will be triple-tested for safety—by the manufacturer, by Dr. Salk, and by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

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Polio vaccine researchers got into a hassle last week over the safety of Dr. Salk’s preparation, in which the virus is killed with formaldehyde. A team from Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital, headed by Dr. Albert Milzer. complained that they had followed Dr. Salk’s published directions faithfully, and the formaldehyde had failed to kill all the virus. On the other hand, said Dr. Milzer, they had no trouble killing the virus with ultraviolet light, and then had made an effective vaccine.

Dr. Salk suggested that the Chicago researchers had brewed their virus broth too strong.