How to use this Page

Today, 12 April 2015 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the announcement that Jonas Salk’s vaccine could prevent poliomyelitis. We asked Charlotte Jacobs, author of Jonas Salk: A Life, a few questions about this event.

The post Jonas Salk and the polio vaccination appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Today is the 60th anniversary of the polio vaccine being declared safe to use. The poliovirus was a major health concern for much of the twentieth century, but in the last sixty years huge gains have been made that have almost resulted in its complete eradication. The condition polio is caused by a human enterovirus called the poliovirus.

The post An interactive timeline of the history of polio appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

By Janet R. Gilsdorf

Every April, when the robins sing and the trees erupt in leaves, I think of Brad — of the curtain wafting through his open window, of the sounds of his iron lung from within, of the heartache of his family. Brad and I grew up at a time when worried mothers barred their children from swimming pools, the circus, and the Fourth of July parade for fear of paralysis. It was constantly on everyone’s minds, cast a shadow over all summertime activities. In spite of the caution, Brad got polio — bad polio, which further terrorized our mothers. It still haunts me. If, somehow, he had managed to avoid the virus for a couple years until the Salk vaccine arrived, none of that — the iron lung, the shriveled limbs, the sling to hold up his head — would have happened.

In 1954, many children in my town, myself included, became “Polio Pioneers” because our parents made us participate in the massive clinical trial of the Salk vaccine. Some of us received the shot of killed virus, others received a placebo. We were proud, albeit scared, to get those jabs, to be part of a big, important experiment. Our moms and dads would have done anything to rid the country of that dreaded disease.

Because the vaccine is so effective, mothers today aren’t terrified of polio. Children in our neighborhoods aren’t growing up in iron lungs or shuffling to school in leg braces. We seem so safe. But our world is smaller than it used to be. The oceans along our coasts can’t stop a pestilence from reaching us from abroad. A polio virus infecting a child in Pakistan, Nigeria, or Afghanistan can hop a plane to New York or Los Angeles or Frankfurt or London, find an unimmunized child, and spread to other unimmunized people. Our earth is not yet free of polio.

Germs are like things that go bump in the night. They can’t been seen, they lurk in familiar places, they are sometimes very harmful, and they instill great fear—some justified, some not.

Fear of measles, like fear of polio, is justified. In the old days, one in twenty children with measles developed pneumonia, one or two in a thousand died. The vaccine changed all that in the developed world. But, measles continues to rage in underdeveloped countries. In a race for very high contagiousness, the measles virus ties the chickenpox virus (which causes another vaccine-preventable childhood infection). Both viruses can catch a breeze and fly. Or they may linger in still air for over an hour. They, too, ride airplanes. This year alone, outbreaks of measles started by imported cases have occurred in New York, California, Massachusetts, Washington, Texas, British Columbia, Italy, Germany, and Netherlands.

Fear of whooping cough (aka pertussis) is also justified. In the pediatric hospital where I work, two young children have died of this infection in the past several years and many others have suffered from the disease, which used to be called “the one-hundred day cough.” It lasts a long time and antibiotic treatment does nothing to shorten the course. Young children with pertussis may quit breathing, have seizures, or bleed into their eyes. It spreads like invisible smoke around high schools and places where people gather … and cough on each other.

On the other hand, fear of vaccines — immunizations against measles, polio, chickenpox, or whooping cough — is hard to understand. In the grand scheme of things, any of these serious infections is a much greater threat than the minimal side effects of a vaccine to prevent them. Just ask the mothers of the children who died of pertussis in my hospital. It’s true that the absolute risk of these infections in resource rich areas is small. But, for even rare infections, a 0.01% risk of disease translates into hundreds of healthy children who don’t have to be sick, or worse yet die, of a preventable infection.

In spite of the great success of vaccines, they aren’t perfect. Perfection is a tall order. Still we can do better. Fortunately, because of the work of my medical and scientific colleagues, new vaccines under development hold promise to be more effective with fewer doses, to provide increased durability of vaccine-induced immunity, and to be even freer of their already rare side effects. And, we’re creating vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus, Staphylococcus aureus, group A Streptococcus, herpes virus, and HIV, to name a few.

Brad would be proud of how far we have come in protecting our children from the horrible affliction that crippled him. He’d also be furious at our failure to vaccinate all our children. Every single one of them. He’d tell us that no child should ever be sacrificed to the ravages of polio or measles or chicken pox or whooping cough.

Janet R. Gilsdorf, MD is the Robert P. Kelch Research Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School and pediatric infectious diseases physician at C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital, Ann Arbor. She is also professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and President-elect of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. Her research focuses on developing new vaccines against Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear infections in children and bronchitis in older adults. She is the author of Inside/Outside: A Physician’s Journey with Breast Cancer and the novel Ten Days.

To raise awareness of World Immunization Week, the editors of Clinical Infectious Diseases, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Open Forum Infectious Diseases, and Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society have highlighted recent, topical articles, which have been made freely available throughout the observance week in a World Immunization Week Virtual Issue. Oxford University Press publishes The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Open Forum Infectious Diseases on behalf of the HIV Medicine Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), and Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society on behalf of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS).

The Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (JPIDS), the official journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, is dedicated to perinatal, childhood, and adolescent infectious diseases. The journal is a high-quality source of original research articles, clinical trial reports, guidelines, and topical reviews, with particular attention to the interests and needs of the global pediatric infectious diseases communities.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only health and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Vaccination. © Sage78 via iStockphoto.

The post Vaccines: thoughts in spring appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

People always ask me if I collect WWII memorabilia/paraphernalia.  The answer is no, the only things I do own from that time are books and some magazines and they were originally purchased for a reason other than this blog.  I really only needed them for reading purposes, not as collector's items.  So, for example, I paid a mere $3.00 for this copy of Nurse Merton, Desert Captive because I needed it and didn't care that it was an old library copy that had not cover and was missing some front pages.

Nurse Merton, Desert Captive

I also have a bunch of magazines for kids from that time and among them are some original issues of a magazine called Calling All Girls.

In July1941, the Parent's Magazine Institute began Calling All Girls for younger teenage girls.  Published on a monthly basis, each issue consisted of comics, fashion (but more along the lines of either sew it yourself or make do and update what you already own kind, not the buy-new-stuff kind of fashion,) stories and other articles that would be of interest to girls.

The United States didn't enter the war until December 1941 and it took Calling All Girls until sometime in 1942 to catch up with current events, but when it did, its pages were filled with war related articles, stories and comics.  Unlike those found in comic books or comic strips in the newspapers, the comics in Calling All Girls were always about girls or women and were designed to be informative.   I thought this one from July 1942 about infantile paralysis or polio was particularly good example of the type of comics found in this magazine.  It was both timely and interesting, since here had been polio epidemics in the 1930s and the 1940s, the March of Dimes had also been founded in 1935 and our wartime President Roosevelt was himself a victim of polio.
(Press images to make them larger)




Display Comments Add a Comment



Left is the original cover for Blue.  Right is the new Blue cover.

 Last December 4th, I wrote about a book called Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter.  As you can see above, Blue has been given a new cover AND now it has a new book trailer. 

And I thought I would rerun the original post, for anyone who may not have seen it.

'If you ask folks around here what they remember about the year 1944,

A child might say, "That was the year my daddy went off to fight Hitler."

A mother might look off towards Bakers Mountain and whisper that

polio snatched up one of her young'uns.

And the Hickory Daily Record will say that my hometown gave

birth to a miracle.' (pg9)

It is January 1944. Everyone in Hickory, NC is focused on the war, including Ann Fay Honeycutt’s family, especially now that her father is off to war to fight Hitler. But even though he is the one going away, 13 year old Ann Fay feels like this moment is the beginning of a journey for her too. Her journey begins when her father gives Ann Fay a pair of overalls and tells her that while he is gone, she needs to be the man of the house. This means planting the victory garden with the help of Junior Bledsoe, a neighbor’s son. It also means looking after her 6 year old twin sisters, Ida and Ellie and her brother Bobby, 4. He tells Bobby to help out, but to make sure he plays everyday.

Things go well until the middle of June 1944. Suddenly, everybody’s focus in Hickory, NC is no longer on the war, but has shifted to their own small county – 12 cases of polio have been diagnosed in Catawba County and the number is steadily climbing. Because Hickory was hardest hit by this polio epidemic, a

Display Comments Add a Comment