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 On
this day in 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field
trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at
the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in
McLean, Virginia.
Children
in the United States, Canada and Finland
participated in the trials, which used for the
first time the now-standard double-blind method,
whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor
knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a
placebo.
On
April 12, 1955, researchers announced the
vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly
became a standard part of childhood
immunizations in America. In the ensuing
decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out
the highly contagious disease in the Western
Hemisphere.
Today,
polio has been eliminated throughout much of the
world due to the vaccine; however, there is
still no cure for the disease and it persists in
a small number of countries in Africa and Asia.
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