Here's an interesting article....
Remember polio?
It was forced back into my memory the other day as I got vaccinated for an upcoming trip abroad. Polio is one of the illnesses I'll need protection against.
Though it's been half a century since the United States faced an epidemic of that crippling virus, parts of the developing world are still susceptible: Worldwide, 815 cases of polio were recorded this month.
The difference, of course, is access to the revolutionary vaccine developed by Jonas Salk in 1955. In countries where vaccinations are routine, the illness has been eradicated.
It's unlikely that incredible breakthrough could take place in America today.
At the height of the epidemic in 1952, polio infected nearly 60,000 people. It stole the use of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's legs, and left actress Mia Farrow in an iron lung for a year. Then came the culmination of years of research, and by 1979, widespread use of the vaccine had eradicated polio in the United States.
Why bring up that old news now? Because what you may not know about the polio vaccine is that it was developed using human fetal tissue.
With his veto, President Bush recently banned federally funded medical research that uses not even fetal tissue but simply stem cells drawn from frozen embryos that will otherwise be discarded.
I wonder if Bush thinks the polio vaccine was a bad idea.
The vaccine is made from the actual virus, which had to be grown in large quantities. Medical researchers at the Rockefeller Institute discovered in 1936 that they could grow the virus quickly in embryonic brain tissue. By 1948, three other researchers, John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, using embryonic skin and muscle tissue, were able to prove that the polio virus could infect tissue other than nerve cells.
That discovery doesn't appear to have generated picketing and presidential bans. Instead, it earned the trio the 1945 Nobel Prize.
There's an exhibit at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C., called "Whatever Happened to Polio?" A friend of mine who visited it described pictures of long lines of people around the United States waiting for their vaccinations. There was even one from The Des Moines Register in the early 1950s, showing "a man in his farmer overalls standing on a ladder to peek in at his child in a Des Moines polio isolation ward."
That was the face of the tragedy to which tens of thousands of Americans were condemned, and some people in developing countries still are consigned because of a lack of access to the vaccine.
Hundreds of thousands of other people continue to have their lives disfigured or cut short because of spinal-cord injuries and neurological diseases. And the stem-cell surgery that continues to be their primary source of hope has been blocked by the U.S. government.
"I wondered if the polio vaccine could have developed in the current political climate," wrote my friend after visiting the exhibit.
I think we already know the answer to that.
Most of us have learned to regard the polio vaccine as one of the most pivotal discoveries of the 20th century. Imagine if the same kind of momentum and resolve were being used today to eradicate Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis and other incurable illnesses. I don't know what new medical breakthroughs might be chronicled in the museums 50 years from now. But I can't imagine history judging our current inaction too kindly.
REKHA BASU can be reached at rbasu@dmreg.com or (515) 284-8584.
AI
