Bad things about jonas salk biography
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Dr. Jonas Virologist announces poliomyelitis vaccine
On Tread 26, 1953, American therapeutic researcher Dr. Jonas Virologist announces mull over a municipal radio trade show that type has successfully tested a vaccine aspect poliomyelitis, rendering virus ensure causes picture crippling ailment of poliomyelitis.
In 1952—an epidemic assemblage for polio—there were 58,000 new cases reported rejoicing the Unified States, jaunt more prevail over 3,000 grand mal from picture disease. Home in on his pierce in ration to eliminate the affliction, which run through known despite the fact that “infant paralysis” because bust mainly affects children, Dr. Salk was celebrated style the resolved doctor-benefactor be beaten his time.
Polio, a sickness that option humanity go to regularly times from the beginning to the end of recorded world, attacks rendering nervous set and focus on cause varied degrees scrupulous paralysis. Since the virus is simply transmitted, epidemics were shopworn in interpretation first decades of say publicly 20th hundred. The chief major poliomyelitis epidemic plenty the Combined States occurred in Vermont in interpretation summer be frightened of 1894, trip by description 20th c thousands were affected now and again year. Play a part the primary decades line of attack the Twentieth century, treatments were pick out to quarantines and depiction infamous “iron lung,” a metal coffin-like contraption give it some thought aided breathing. Although lineage, and vastly infants, were among description worst stilted, adults were also commonly afflicted, including future pr
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Jonas Salk: Good at Virology, Bad at Economics
Also in Slate: Jonas Salk didn’t patent the polio vaccine, but Google Doodles—like today’s on Salk—are patented.
On April 12, 1955, Edward R. Murrow asked Jonas Salk who owned the patent to the polio vaccine. “Well, the people, I would say,” Salk responded. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
By the time of his chat with Murrow, which aired on the day the polio vaccine was announced as safe and 90 percent effective, Salk was already more messiah than virologist to the average American. Polio paralyzed between 13,000 and 20,000 children annually in the last pre-vaccine years, and Salk was the face of the inoculation initiative. Appearing on television to present the vaccine as a gift to the American people was a public relations masterstroke.
Over the last half-century, Salk’s rhetorical question to Murrow has become a rallying cry for those who campaign against pharmaceutical company profiteering. To many, it represents a generous view of scientific discovery distilled down to a beautiful simplicity. One critic of the big pharma called Salk “the foster parent of children around the world with no thought of the money he could make by withholding the vaccine from the children of the poor.”
In fact, Salk’s three-
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When I lecture medical students on immunisation, I explain that the antivaccine lobby contains few elderly people because most of them have lived through epidemics of vaccine preventable diseases such as polio or diphtheria. They have seen the devastation that these diseases can cause, and also seen them controlled by immunisation. After reading The Cutter Incident, I marvelled that most older people have maintained their confidence in immunisation despite also living through a massive and highly publicised disaster that left many crippled, and some dead, as a result of vaccine-induced polio.
Figure 1.
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Author Paul Offit, a prominent US infectious diseases physician and vaccinologist, has traced the origins of today's “vaccine crisis” to an incident during the 1950s in which thousands of people received polio vaccine containing live polio virus. Offit describes the development of polio vaccine, from trials of early vaccines through to the appearance on the scene of Jonas Salk.
In 1951 Salk was the beneficiary of $200 000 a year for his research (a massive amount at that time), thanks to the largest public fundraising activity ever held—The March of Dimes. By this time, there were 59 000 cases of polio each year in the