Vaccine for Polio

There was solid good news on the polio front last week, and some not so solid. Across the U.S., many a hasty reader got the idea that polio could be licked in 1953. The sober facts:

Research Director Harry Weaver told the top brass of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis that a way has been found to treat polio virus with chemicals so that it is 1) too weak to cause the disease, but 2) still capable, when injected, of inducing the human system to manufacture antibodies. These antibodies (tiny protein particles in the blood) will protect the subject against a later invasion of full-strength polio virus. Admittedly, said Dr. Weaver, when the virus is weakened for injection, so is its power to spark antibody formation. But it keeps more of this power if it is given in certain oils.

Monkeys First. "I would like to be able to announce that field tests with such a vaccine will be undertaken during 1953," Dr. Weaver went on, but he could not say this for certain. Nevertheless, he had the feeling that the attack on polio was about to make a big advance.

Behind Weaver's weeds stand years of painstaking work by Virus Researcher Jonas Salk in University of Pittsburgh laboratories. Dr. Salk and his co-workers take samples of all three varieties (the Lansing, Prunhilde and Leon strains) of polio virus and grow them in test tubes with pieces of monkey testicle. They grind up this stuff and treat it with formaldehyde. There is doubt as to whether the chemical "kills" the virus, but no doubt that it knocks it cold. Dr. Salk has taken some of the resulting vaccine and injected it into monkeys. Within three weeks, samples of their blood contained polio antibodies, but not in great strength.

Dr. Salk also found that if he put the formaldehyde-treated virus in a purified mineral oil, and injected it that way, the antibodies showed up in greater strength. (The oil probably cannot directly influence the making of antibodies, but it holds the virus material in the body longer, just as oils are used to hold penicillin in the system.) After a while, the monkeys got inoculations of live polio virus which ordinarily would have caused crippling disease or death; not one of them even got sick.

Children Second. Next came tests on a group of children. They got the vaccine and were none the worse. Soon, their blood had a good stock of antibodies. The test had to stop there: the children could not be deliberately exposed to live virus and the risk of dangerous illness. But if the vaccine is safe, as it seems to be, then it can be given to a lot of children in an area where polio is expected to be epidemic. If few or none of the inoculated children get polio, while others around them are stricken, the answer will be in.

Dr. Salk's labs can probably make enough vaccine for Dr. Weaver's field test this year. But if the test succeeds, it will take at least another year to get mass-production quantities of vaccine.

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