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Making a difference by working to make polio globally "Drop to Zero"...

Seventy years ago, poliomyelitis University of Michigan School of announced an even more effective
was an insidious, highly-infectious Public Health where he worked oral vaccine. Soon massive vaccina-
and virtually incurable disease. alongside his mentor, virologist Dr. tion programs swept the country.
During the 1940s and 1950s, it Thomas Francis, Jr
became an annual summer epidem- In 1960, Dr. Albert Sabin See POLIO, page 18
ic worldwide. The disease would
sweep through whole communities,
paralyzing and often killing hundreds
of children. Little was known about
how polio was contracted and noth-
ing was known about how to prevent
it. Swimming pools, beaches, movie
theaters, bowling alleys...all were
thought to be breeding places for the
mysterious virus. Parents around
the world lived in real fear of their
children becoming victims. So did
the children. Some of our club mem-
bers remember that fear.
In 1954, Dr. Jonas Salk, then a
University of Pittsburgh physician,
was the first to develop and mass
test a vaccine which proved to be
effective against polio. Salk's inter-
est in polio grew out of his efforts on Rotarian Sam Kennedy administering life saving
a flu vaccine in the 1940s, at the polio vaccine to an infant in Niger, Africa.

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