By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
Part two of a two-part series
TUESDAY, Dec. 2, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A nationwide trial of an experimental vaccine using school children as virtual guinea pigs would be unthinkable in the United States today.
But that's exactly what happened in 1954 when frantic American parents -- looking for anything that could beat back the horror of polio -- offered up more than 1.8 million children to serve as test subjects. They included 600,000 kids who would be injected with either a new polio vaccine or a placebo.
Equally remarkable, the Salk polio vaccine trial stands as the largest peacetime mobilization of volunteers in American history, requiring the efforts of 325,000 doctors, nurses, educators and private citizens -- with no money from federal grants or pharmaceutical companies. The results were tracked by volunteers using pencils and paper.
And it lasted just one year, with officials hopeful at the outset that they would be able to begin giving the vaccine to children within weeks of the final results.
"I can't imagine what the disease would be today that could get that many parents to sign up their children for an experimental vaccine trial," said Daniel Wilson, a history professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., who has written three books on the history of polio in the United States and is himself a polio survivor. "I think it's a measure of how much people feared polio that mothers and fathers were willing to accept the word of researchers that the vaccine was safe."
Financing for the trial came from donations made to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis -- the forerunner of the March of Dimes. The foundation was created in 1938 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his law partner, Basil O'Connor.
Roosevelt had a profoundly personal interest in defeating polio -- the disease left him crippled in 1921 at age 39, and he spent his entire presidency in leg braces, confined to a wheelchair, unable to even get up by himself.
The National Foundation spent $7.5 million in donations -- $66.3 million in today's dollars -- to initiate, organize and run the vaccine trial, with little participation from the federal government.
"That's what makes it the greatest public health experiment in history," said David Oshinsky, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Polio: An American Story. "It's not just the success of the trials. It's the incredible organization involved, with tens of thousands of mothers and families coming together to save their children. And it was all done privately. That's what makes this so incredible."
There was enormous pressure to get the field trial under way in advance of the 1954 polio season. Polio epidemics took place during the summer, with the number of cases rising through June and July and peaking in August.
"We realized we wanted to get it accomplished in 1954, early enough that it could possibly have an impact on that year's polio season," said David Rose, archivist for the March of Dimes.
A grass-roots movement without precedent
The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis already had a nationwide network of health officials, medical professionals, elementary educators and volunteers in place to help respond to polio outbreaks. These were the same people who would form the workforce needed for the clinical trial. In addition, the foundation's annual "Mother's March" raised millions in dimes and dollars each year, which was used for polio research and aid to communities enduring polio epidemics.
Some of that money had funded Dr. Jonas Salk's creation in 1952 of an experimental "killed-virus" polio vaccine, and his subsequent experiments that proved the vaccine's safety in humans.
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