Introduction
On 12 April 1955, church bells rang out across the United States to celebrate the long-awaited announcement that the largest clinical trial then undertaken had confirmed the safety and efficacy of the first-ever vaccine against polio (Oshinsky 2005). A mere 2 years earlier, 36,000 children across the United States had been killed or paralyzed by poliomyelitis. Estimates of worldwide polio incidence suggest that before the discovery of Jonas Salk’s intravenous polio vaccine (IPV), there were nearly 600,000 cases of the disease every year (Smallman-Raynor and Cliff 2006). The relief from fear brought about by the vaccine was palpable across the world: Salk had babies named after him, was fêted by movie stars, and received thousands of gifts and messages from distant admirers (including a 209-foot-long telegram signed by 8,000 grateful residents of Winnipeg, Canada).
Poliomyelitis – a name derived from Greek for “inflammation of the grey marrow” – is caused by infection with...
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References
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Further Reading
Taylor, S. A. J. (2015). Culture and behaviour in mass health interventions: Lessons from the global polio eradication initiative. Critical Public Health, 25(2), 192–204.
Taylor, S. (2016). In pursuit of zero: Polio, global health security, and the politics of eradication in Peshawar, Pakistan. Geoforum, 69(1), 106–116.
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Taylor, . (2019). Poliomyelitis and Child Paralysis. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_550-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_550-1
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