April 12, 2005 -- Smithsonian Marks 50th Polio Vaccine Anniversary

Today, April 12, is the 50th anniversary of the day in 1955 when it was announced that a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and a team of scientists at the University of Pittsburgh had been found to be “safe, effective, and potent” in preventing polio, an illness that had paralyzed as many as 20,000 persons—many of them children—each year in the United States. In the 50 years since the first vaccinations were given using the Salk vaccine, the United States and the whole Western Hemisphere have been declared to be free of the wild poliovirus, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington is mounting a year-long exhibition titled “Whatever Happened to Polio?” The exhibition also highlights the work of another polio researcher, Dr. Albert Sabin, whose oral polio vaccine was licensed in 1961. The Sabin vaccine, which delivers an attenuated live form of the polio virus, was widely given to children and is still used in polio eradication campaigns in parts of the world that experience polio, because of its ease of administration. The Salk vaccine, which requires an injection, delivers an inactivated polio virus and is now the recommended childhood immunization in the United States, after the Sabin vaccine was found to cause occasional cases of polio. Information about polio disease, vaccine, and eradication efforts is available at www.cdc.gov/nip. Information about the Smithsonian exhibit is available at www.americanhistory.si.edu.