Essay About United States And National Foundation

Jonas Salk
Essay Preview: Jonas Salk
Report this essay
Poliomyelitis (shortened to polio) has been around for thousands of
years, and there is still no cure, but at the peak of its devastation in the United
States, Dr. Jonas Salk introduced a way to prevent it. Polio attacks the nerve
cells and sometimes the central nervous system, causing muscle wasting,
paralysis, and even death. The disease, whose symptoms are flu like, stuck
mostly children, and in the first half of the 20th century the epidemics of polio
were becoming more devastating. Salk, while working at the Virus Research
Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, developed a polio vaccine, and the
medical trials to prove its effectiveness and safety are still being analyzed.
Fifty years ago the largest medical experiment in history took place to
test Salks poliomyelitis vaccine. Close to two million children across the
United States and Canada were involved in the trial, which was administered
by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), also known as the
March of Dimes. The foundation, created in 1938 by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt (a polio victim) and his law partner Basil OConnor. Across the
United States, 623,972 school children were injected with the vaccine or a
placebo, using a double blind technique in which neither recipient nor
administrator knew which one there were getting. The results, announced in
1955, showed good statistical evidence that Jonas Salks “killed virus”
preparation was 80-90% effective in preventing paralytic poliomyelitis.
The statistical design used in the experiment was singular, prompting
criticism. Eighty four test areas in eleven states used a textbook model: in a
randomized, blinded design all participating children in the first three grades
of school (ages 6-9) received injections of either vaccine for placebo and
were observed. At the same time though, 127 test areas in 33 states used an
“observed control” design: where the participating children in the second
grade received injections of vaccine, no placebo was given, and children in all
three grades were then observed for the duration of the polio season. The use
of the dual protocol illustrates both the power and the limitations of
randomized clinical trials. The control trials with the placebo were important
to define the vaccine as the product of scientific medicine, while the observed
trials