How did Jonas Salk and Albert B. Sabin save lives?
American physicians Jonas Salk (1914–1995) and Albert B. Sabin (1906– ) invented vaccines (substances introduced into the body in order to produce immunity to disease) to prevent poliomyelitis (called polio or infantile paralysis), an infection caused by a virus that attacks the central nervous system. Polio exists throughout the world, and in 1952 more than 21,000 cases of the most serious form of polio—paralytic polio—were reported in the United States alone. Polio sufferers were mainly children who, if they survived, might be paralyzed for life. In 1953 Salk created a vaccine that contained the killed viruses of the three kinds of polio then known. Salk was so certain of the vaccine’s safety that he tested it on himself and his family with great success. Then, with support from the March of Dimes (then called the National Foundation for…
