Wiping Out Polio

Green parks beckoned to picnickers; yellow Lake Erie beaches glittered with summer sun. At Municipal Stadium the first-place Indians turned out for baseball. But Cleveland seemed not to notice. Attendance at the ballpark dropped from a normal 30,000 to 11,000; business at parks and beaches dwindled to a standstill. The city was otherwise occupied. At schools, police stations and fire houses, thousands queued up for the privilege of swallowing sugar cubes impregnated with drops of Sabin oral polio vaccine.

For weeks the campaign slogan "SOS --Sabin Oral Sunday" had been hammering the city. Bus drivers wore SOS badges. Newspapers carried front-page exhortations along with editorials and cartoons. SOS signs were plastered on buses and billboards. On the telephone, recorded voices repeated the SOS slogan along with the weather and time of day.

The goal was to give every Clevelander three doses of Sabin oral polio vaccine at monthly intervals between May and August. And Cleveland was reaching that goal with more dispatch than the city's sponsoring Academy of Medicine had considered possible.

Damnedest Jam. At each of the 92 vaccination centers, Boy Scouts put the sugar cubes into paper cups. Pharmacists doused the sugar with three drops of vaccine. As the vaccine ran low, ambulances (many donated by undertakers) with sirens screaming struggled through clogged streets to deliver fresh supplies. Said one cop: "It is the damnedest traffic jam I've ever seen, but nobody's mad." In the carnival atmosphere, pitchmen picked up many a rapid dollar peddling balloons to kids. "Is this American or Cuban sugar?" asked one apprehensive citizen. Assured the U.S. was buying no sugar from Cuba these days, he munched his lump with satisfaction. Another man had another problem: "I've been drinking.

Will it hurt me to take this stuff?" Told that he could take the vaccine without harm, he said: "I mean it's liquor I been drinking." Again he was reassured. One Clevelander asked for vaccine to take to a friend waiting in his car--already paralyzed by one type of polio. An attendant took the vaccine to the car.

One Step Further. Even before Cleveland began to gulp down the live-virus oral Sabin vaccine, killed-virus Salk vaccine had compiled an enviable record in suppressing polio. In the last seven years, Salk vaccine has cut Cleveland's polio to a total of 417 cases, compared with 3,338 in the previous seven years. But, says Dr. Howard H. Hopwood of the Academy of Medicine, the Sabin method has important advantages over Salk in mass vaccination campaigns. The live virus can be given by mouth, rather than by needle. It not only builds up polio-fighting antibodies in the bloodstream, as does the killed-virus Salk vaccine, but also promotes intestinal immunity, thus preventing the spread of polio in sewage. So Sabin vaccine can lead to the complete eradication of polio.

So far, more than 90% of Clevelanders have received the most important types of virus in their Sabin vaccine--types I and III. But when they get their third portion of Sabin vaccine (type II) in late July, they will have swallowed more than 4,500,000 doses at the modest cost of $750,000. The academy expects that this will be entirely covered by donations (recommended: 25-c- per dose) from those who were treated. So successful is the campaign that by next winter other cities across the country may well follow Cleveland's style and send out their own well-publicized SOS.

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