Polio Through History | Britannica

The age of the vaccine

The poliovirus itself was discovered in 1908 by a team led by Viennese immunologist and future Nobel Prize winner Karl Landsteiner. The existence of telltale antibodies specific to the virus circulating in the blood of infected persons was discovered only two years later. In 1931 two Australian researchers, Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Jean Macnamara, using immunologic techniques, were able to identify the different serotypes of the poliovirus. (Burnet was to receive a Nobel Prize in 1960.)

In 1948 the team of John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins, working at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, showed how the virus could be grown in large amounts in tissue culture (an advance for which they shared a Nobel Prize in 1954). From there it was only a short step to an announcement in 1953 by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that he had developed an effective killed-virus vaccine.

Britannica Quiz 44 Questions from Britannica’s Most Popular Health and Medicine Quizzes

Salk’s vaccine, known as the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), was put to a massive nationwide test in 1954–55. Called the Francis Field Trial after Thomas Francis, Jr., a University of Michigan professor who directed it, the test involved 1.8 million children in the first, second, and third grades across the United States. The trial was declared a success on April 12, 1955, and over the next four years more than 450 million doses of the Salk vaccine were distributed. During that time the incidence of paralytic polio in the United States fell from 18 cases per 100,000 population to fewer than 2 per 100,000. In the years 1961–63, approval was given to a new vaccine developed by Albert Sabin at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. The Sabin vaccine, using live but attenuated virus, could be given in drops through the mouth and therefore became known as the oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV). Soon it became the predominant vaccine used in the United States and most other countries. By the early 1970s the annual incidence of polio in the United States had declined a thousandfold from prevaccine levels, to an average of 12 cases a year.

That progress was mirrored in other industrialized countries. Canada, having suffered its worst outbreak in 1953 (almost 9,000 cases of all types of polio), quickly began production of the Salk and Sabin vaccines, and in 1965 only three cases of polio were reported. Finland began limited vaccination with the Salk vaccine in 1957 following two major outbreaks in 1954 and 1956. Some 1.5 million persons were vaccinated in a mass campaign in 1960–61, which eliminated the disease altogether in that country. Belgium began using the Salk vaccine in 1958 and the Sabin vaccine in 1963; as a result, polio disappeared as an endemic disease in the late 1960s. Denmark introduced IPV to its population in 1955 and OPV in 1963 and experienced only sporadic cases of the disease after 1962.