My mother, Claire Taffet, in her lab at Columbia University doing polio research.
News that polio is on the rise again in some areas is very disturbing.
Today is Polio Awareness Day. I love that Polio Awareness Day is today because it would also have been my mother’s 95th birthday. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, my mother worked at Columbia University in a bacteriology lab creating the polio vaccine.
She had a lab assistant that she and her friend Mae referred to as “the snotty intern.” The intern’s name was Jonas Salk, the doctor who went on to perfect their work and create the first polio vaccine that vaccine, released in 1955.
Several years after the Salk vaccine came out, Dr. Albert Sabin, who everyone enjoyed working with, developed the oral vaccine that works in the intestines where polio multiplied and entered the bloodstream. His vaccine stops the means of transmission. Sabin went on to create vaccines for encephalitis and dengue fever.
In 1960, Salk established the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., where valuable research has been done on AIDS, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and more.
Polio has been known throughout history, but larger epidemics began in Europe in the 1880s and in the U.S. in the early 20th century. At the height of the epidemic in the 1940s and 50s, polio killed half a million people in the world every year. Those that contracted the virus and didn’t die were left paralyzed.
So on Polio Awareness Day, if you haven’t been vaccinated or had your kids vaccinated, please do. Vaccines are safe and do not cause autism or any of the other things idiots like Rep. Michelle Bachman claim.
