Paper: HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Date: SUN 04/10/05
Section: A
Page: 1
Edition: 4 STAR

THE POLIO VACCINE / 50 YEARS LATER / FIGHT TO END AMEDICAL MENACE / APRIL 12, 1955: Polio was a dreaded childhooddisease that left Harris County one of the hardest-hit areas ofthe country. Then 50 years ago, there was hope / TODAY: Thoughsurvivors still struggle with polio 's effects, a vaccine hasended polio in much of the world. And its eradication ispossible.

By ERIC BERGER
Staff

Poliomyelitis is but a distant echo for most Americans.

The only terror now conjured by the disease comes in the tense seconds as a baby feels a needle's sting. After a spurt of tears, the infant soon forgets the shot, never to worry about polio again.

Yet half a century ago, during the generally ebullient mid-1950s era of James Dean, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, polio bred a darker and permanent terror. Unlike influenza and most other viruses, which prey upon the old and infirm, polio stalked the healthiest, most active children every summer. It killed or paralyzed tens of thousands, with Harris County regularly vying for the most national cases.

Mere whispers of an outbreak froze daily life: Swimming pools closed, movie theaters emptied, and front doors were slammed shut in a frenzy, those who recall say, incomparable to anything since the plagues of the Middle Ages.

"I was brought up in a crowded tenement area of Brooklyn, and I remember very clearly my mother locking my brother and I in our house, saying she had heard of a polio outbreak down the block," said Dr. Stanley Schultz, dean of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. "Even though it was the middle of the summer, we didn't mind staying home. We were scared, too."

Then, miraculously, the terror ended. On April 12, 1955, after testing 1.8 million children, scientists announced that a vaccine designed by Dr. Jonas Salk, of the University of Pittsburgh, had proved extraordinarily successful.

The public health legacy of vanquishing polio still resonates today in the widely held belief that disease is largely optional - that, with enough focus and funding, medical research can end cancer or most any major health problem.

Scars remain

The polio experience also has lessons for doctors battling debilitating afflictions such as diabetes and obesity that now threaten society. Like polio , these kill or, more commonly, leave people seriously disabled. It's estimated their long-term care costs, if they continue unchecked, could eventually bankrupt public and private health care.

"The polio vaccine is a testament to the power of preventive medicine," said Dr. Ralph Feigin, physician in chief at Texas Children's Hospital and former president of Baylor College of Medicine. "Its cost-benefit ratio is astronomical."

But for most who lived through the harrowing summers before the Salk vaccine , or became infected and lived life despite it, the true impact can be measured only in the enormous misery and human suffering it prevented. If landing men on the moon and dropping an atomic bomb rank as the two scientific achievements that left the deepest public imprint in the last century, a polio vaccine arguably deserves the bronze medal.

The disease's survivors, people such as Virginia Chase, who has lived with polio for every one of her 59 years , remain scarred today.

Chase has worn a brace on her leg since her first birthday and, in recent years , has increasingly lost use of her other limbs. A cherished hobby, gardening at her Shoreacres home, is only a dream.

Born in rural Louisiana and infected months later , Chase said her parents were allowed to visit for just a few hours every Sunday in a distant New Orleans charity hospital, the state's only one that accepted polio patients.

What has struck Chase, as both a mother, and later a grandmother, is not her own trials with the disease but polio 's wider impact on family and friends.

"I cannot imagine the torture my mother went through leaving her 6-month-old in the hospital like that," Chase said. "How desperate it all must have seemed."

A widening threat

Historians have traced polio to ancient Egypt, where depictions of it appear in engravings.

But the first polio epidemics weren't recorded until the 1800s, and the disease didn't explode into public view until 1916, when 9,000 cases were seen in New York City.

After that, polio threatened America and other advancing cultures with increasing frequency.

The rise of polio coincided, paradoxically, with improved hygiene. The polio virus is transmitted in fecal matter or, like a cold, by nose and mouth secretions. After entering a victim's mouth, the virus establishes itself in the intestines, traveling to the spinal cord or brain. If it kills enough motor neurons, it can cause paralysis or death. Only a small fraction of people are vulnerable to this paralytic form of polio . Most perceive polio as a bad cold.

In societies with no indoor plumbing, babies are routinely exposed to infection, but paralysis rarely occurs in infancy. Early exposure typically yields lifetime immunity. (Virginia Chase is an exception.) Better plumbing meant children were exposed at a later age, when the disease became more dangerous.

Although identified as a virus by 1908, much of the other limited polio research had drawn incorrect conclusions, including a belief that a vaccine could not work. Polio research was difficult. The virus survived only in laboratory monkeys, expensive and sometimes exasperating animals to work with.

Polio 's course was profoundly affected in 1920 when the disease struck a promising young politician, preventing him from ever walking again.

It wasn't until 1938, however, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his law partner, Basil O'Connor, established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1938, a private organization to lead the fight against polio .

Later , after ending polio in the United States, the group changed its focus to birth defects and became the March of Dimes, so-named for the dimes collected at teas, luncheons and parades to combat polio .

"It's no coincidence that Roosevelt appears on the dime," said Jeffrey Kluger, author of Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio .

The national foundation became an immediate success, raising $1.8 million in its first year. But as research proceeded slowly, partly because of the difficulties with using monkeys, real progress in developing a vaccine would wait a decade.

2 approaches in research

The key to making a polio vaccine lies in triggering the body's immune system to produce antibodies to destroy the virus.

There were two possible ways of doing this - taking active strains of the polio virus and killing them with a chemical such as formaldehyde, or weakening the virus so it didn't cause harm.

Either a killed- or live-virus vaccine , then, could ideally stimulate the body's immune system to fight future polio infections but not harm the recipient.

The problem was this: Even if a suitable viral strain were found, gobs of virus would be needed to prepare enough vaccine for widespread use.

Until 1948, scientists thought the polio virus would grow only in the brains and spinal cords of monkeys and humans.

And, years earlier, viruses grown in monkey nervous systems had caused fatal brain damage in humans.

Then, in 1948, Drs. John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, working in a lab at Children's Hospital in Boston, found a way to grow polio in skin and muscle tissue.

They were trying to grow the virus that causes chickenpox in these tissues, and Weller decided, almost as an afterthought, to try polio as well.

"I don't think, at the time, we quite understood the significance of what we had done," said Weller, now 89.

The discovery won the trio a Nobel Prize in 1954.

Shortly after this breakthrough, other scientists quickly grasped its significance. One was 35-year-old Jonas Salk, who began work with a killed-virus vaccine at Pittsburgh.

Another was the more established Dr. Albert Sabin, of Cincinnati, whose work with a live-virus vaccine would trigger a classic, prideful scientific rivalry, not unlike the local Houston one between famed heart surgeons Drs. Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley.

Harris County hardest-hit

In the late 1940s, after the horrors of World War II ended, polio and its terrors fed increasing public hysteria.

The number of cases grew, especially in the South, as improved plumbing spread.

Although most metropolitan areas suffered an epidemic once a decade or so, Houston fared far worse, said Heather Campbell, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researching local polio for her dissertation.

Between 1943 and 1955, Campbell said, Houston had a major epidemic, on average, every other year.

In the epidemic years , Harris County led or nearly led the country in the number of cases. During the country's worst year, in 1952, when there were 58,000 cases of polio , Harris County had the most - more than 1,000.

"It's probably safe to say Harris County was the hardest-hit area in the country by polio ," she said. "We were continually hit by major epidemics."

As a result, the Southwestern Poliomyelitis Respiratory Center, the first U.S. center dedicated to caring for polio patients, opened in 1951 at the old Jefferson Davis Hospital. Some staff came from Baylor. The center eventually handled about 10 percent of the nation's new polio cases.

Under the guidance of Dr. William Spencer, the center eventually became the Texas Institute for Rehabilitation and Research.

`The vaccine works'

The Salk vaccine trial, the largest medical test ever in 1954, was a populist effort. Some 100 million Americans had donated to the national foundation's cause. In May 1954, a Gallup poll found that more Americans were aware of Salk's vaccine trial than knew the full name of the president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

So widespread joy followed the April 12 declaration - the 10th anniversary of Roosevelt's death - by study director Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., of the University of Michigan, that: "The vaccine works. It is safe, effective and potent."

Shortly after this announcement, Oveta Culp Hobby, the U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare and later publisher of the Houston Post, agreed to license the use of enough vaccine for about 3 million children. In anticipation of a successful trial, the national foundation had paid five manufacturers to produce this supply in advance.

"It's a wonderful day for the whole world," Hobby said, signing the licenses.

Although there was not enough vaccine for every school-age child, an incident just two weeks later considerably dampened demand. Five vaccinated children in California became infected with polio .

The vaccinations were soon linked to problems at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, one of the five manufacturers. In the end, 79 children who were vaccinated, and 105 of their friends and family, became infected with polio . Eleven people died. Five states, including California, suspended use of the vaccine .

Adjusting the course

Salk's critics, including Sabin and Weller, said the national foundation pushed too far, too fast with the trials and manufacture of the drug.

"I think, obviously, it was rushed," Weller said. "I think the formula for the vaccine was being changed all the time, up to the last minute."

Others who worked during the era say they think differently. Before the trial, Dr. Sam Baron had worked as a postdoctoral student of Francis and joined the National Institutes of Health in 1955 just after the Cutter incident.

"The feeling at the time was that they were acting prudently," Baron, now a professor of microbiology and immunology at UTMB, said of Salk and the national foundation.

Baron worked in the lab at NIH charged with determining what had gone wrong. The scientists ended up modifying the use of a solution of formaldehyde and water that killed the virus used in the vaccine .

Concerns over vaccine safety prevented it from becoming fully adopted. There weren't widespread campaigns in Houston until the late 1950s, about the time Dr. Joseph Melnick came to town, wooed by Baylor to start a virology program.

Strategizing at Baylor

Melnick was one of the polio fight's heroes. He helped classify polio as a virus native to the gut and later devised ways to preserve it at room temperature, a must for any vaccination campaign. One of 17 members of the Polio Hall of Fame in Warm Springs, Ga., he came to Houston from Yale University in 1958.

His wife, Dr. Matilda Melnick, recalls one of her husband's first tasks at Baylor, then affiliated with the Baptist university in Waco, was to establish housing for monkeys needed for polio research. Red lights, she said, kept the monkeys warm.

"We called it the red-light district of Baylor," she said with a wink.

Joe Melnick also had close relations with Salk's chief competitor, Albert Sabin, a brilliant but temperamental scientist.

Sabin routinely decried Salk's pursuit of a killed-virus vaccine as unsafe and not as effective as the live-virus vaccine he was developing.

"Both Salk and Sabin were giants," said Dr. Palmer Beasley, recently retired as dean of the UT School of Public Health at Houston and a colleague of the two. "Both had their personality flaws. They certainly fought with each other. No doubt Sabin attacked Salk, but, honestly, he was dismissive of everybody."

Because of Melnick, Houston was one of three trial sites for Sabin's live-virus vaccine in 1960, which became widely used a year later . The new vaccine , given orally, ultimately proved more successful in eradication efforts - which continue in the world today - because it was cheaper, easier to administer and provided wider immunity.

But on rare occasions, in fewer than 1 in 1 million cases, Sabin's vaccine causes polio . Largely because of this, after eradication here, U.S. vaccination guidelines reverted to using a modified form of Salk's vaccine in the 1990s.

Beasley said he thinks quarreling between Salk and Sabin undid any chance either had at a Nobel Prize for their work. Others criticized Salk for lacking a eureka moment and merely adapting the work of others to develop the vaccine .

`Forgotten disease'

More demeaning, scientists say, was Salk's lack of inclusion in the National Academy of Sciences.

Despite several nominations, Salk was always voted down by his peers.

"I believe there were professional jealousies because so much public attention was focused on one person," said Dr. Peter Salk, Jonas Salk's eldest son and scientific director of the Jonas Salk Foundation.

"Obviously, credit is absolutely due to everyone. The vaccine was a team effort. But on the other hand, this was my father's responsibility. It was his lab, he was the one who faced the trials and tribulations. I just feel it's a little unfair. The publicity wasn't something my father sought. It's just something that happened."

Ultimately, Jonas Salk, the child of immigrants, got what he wanted.

Earlier in his research career, before his polio work took off, Salk always struggled for more lab space, funding and independence.

In 1960, public acclaim and support allowed him to found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego.

Today it has 56 faculty investigators, including four Nobel laureates.

He worked there until his death in 1995, at 80, long after polio had been replaced by viral threats such as HIV and, today, SARS, West Nile virus and avian influenza.

"The whole thing is forgotten. Polio is a forgotten disease," Matilda Melnick said. "The medical students today, they have never seen a case. There are many people, if you go to a medical school today, who don't even know who Sabin and Salk were."

And perhaps that is not such a bad thing.