The history of polio vaccination with "Sabin's OPV" 60 years after its introduction in Italy: an unforgivable "delay".

In the spring of 1964, polio vaccination with the oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin began in Italy. Polio was feared in the world and in Italy. Thus, between 1957 and the beginning of 1958, Italian children began receiving the "Salk vaccine", though the results were not particularly convincing. In July 1960, the international scientific community was able to verify the data from the mass testing of the Sabin vaccine. It became clear that the OPV, could prevent the virus from multiplying, thereby providing greater protection and determining the eradication of the disease. In 1960 over 70 million people in the USSR alone had already received the oral vaccine and mass vaccination in the USA would start in March 1961. However, in Italy there was no similar initiative; only later the new vaccine was accepted but was not made compulsory at the beginning. As a result of the commission's report, registration of the "Polioral" vaccine, was authorized in September 1962 but the sale of the vaccine was not authorized until November 1963. At the beginning of 1964, the production of "Polioral" started and the product was marketed and on the 1 st of March 1964, anti-polio vaccination with the "Sabin anti-polio vaccine" also began in Italy. This manuscript focuses on a crucial issue about a historical delay for public health and it points out as the preparation and diffusion of the Sabin polio vaccine demonstrates that decisions regarding health treatments, and specifically vaccination campaigns, must be based exclusively on the results of clinical studies and on independent evaluation by the scientific community. This process ensures trust in vaccines, adequate protection of public health andcitizens' well-being.

Descripción del brote de poliomielitis en la Argentina de 1971 / Description of the 1971 poliomyelitis outbreak in Argentina

La poliomielitis es una enfermedad de antigua data que afecta exclusivamente a los humanos. Sus secuelas de parálisis se encuentran ya documentadas en escritos del antiguo Egipto. Es producida por el poliovirus y se transmite por vía fecal-oral. Uno de cada doscientos niños infectados sufre un ataque vírico a las neuronas motoras del sistema nervioso central, que deja como secuela una parálisis flácida muscular. En la Argentina, las últimas epidemias de poliomielitis ocurrieron entre 1955 y1957, en 1971 y en 1983. La epidemia de 1953 registró 2.700 casos, mientras que en la de 1956 hubo 6.490 casos, con una tasa de mortalidad del 33,7%. Durante 1971, 46 pacientes fueron internados con diagnóstico de poliomielitis en las salas que dependían de la cátedra de Enfermedades Infecciosas de la Facultad de Ciencias Médicas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, en el predio del Hospital Francisco Javier Muñiz. La cohorte estaba compuesta por 26 varones y 20 mujeres. Hemos realizado una revisión de las historias clínicas de aquellos pacientes, obrantes en el archivo de la cátedra. (AU)

Poliomyelitis is a human disease of ancient origin. Evidence of sequelae of paralysis is documented in ancient Egyptian writings. It is caused by the poliovirus and is transmitted through the fecal-oral route. One out of 200 infected children suffers a viral attack on the central nervous system´s motor neurons, which results in flaccid muscle paralysis. In Argentina, the last polio epidemics occurred between 1955 and 1957, in 1971 and in 1983. The 1953 poliomyelitis epidemic reported a total of 2,700 cases, while in the 1956 outbreak 6,490 cases were recorded with a mortality rate of 33.7%. In 1971, 46 patients were diagnosed with poliomyelitis and admitted to the wards of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, located in the Javier Muñiz Hospital. The cohort consisted of 26 men and 20 women. We reviewed the medical records of those patients, recorded in the Department´s archive. (AU)

[Compassionate culture in addressing polio in healthcare settings. The spanish case (1940-1970)]. / La cultura compasiva en el abordaje de la poliomielitis en entornos sanitarios. El caso español (1940-1970).

The presence of epidemic outbreaks of poliomyelitis in the initial and central decades of the last century constituted an important Public Health problem due to the absence of effective treatments because it preferentially affected children, in environments with acceptable levels of health, and the fear of the paralytic sequelae. This work attempted to reconstruct some of the responses that were given in the Spanish state, both in professional health settings and from alternative heterodox approaches such as the Kenny method, taking as a reference axis the compassionate culture that was behind the development of the measures. adopted and their critical analysis, in the period before the implementation of anti-polio vaccines.

La presencia de brotes epidémicos de poliomielitis en las décadas iniciales y centrales del siglo pasado constituyó un importante problema de Salud Pública, debido a la ausencia de tratamientos eficaces, por afectar de forma preferente a edades infantiles, en entornos con niveles aceptables de salubridad y por las temibles secuelas paralíticas. En este trabajo se intentan reconstruir algunas de las respuestas que se dieron en el estado español, tanto en los ámbitos profesionales sanitarios como desde planteamientos heterodoxos alternativos como el método Kenny, tomando como eje de referencia la cultura compasiva que estuvo detrás del desarrollo de las medidas adoptadas, así como su análisis crítico, en el periodo anterior a la puesta en marcha de las vacunas antipoliomielíticas.

The Autumn Ghost-The Danish Polio Epidemic of 1952 and the Birth of Intensive Care Medicine.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews The Autumn Ghost, an historical retelling of the 1952 polio epidemic in Copenhagen, Denmark, which catalyzed developments in anesthesia and respiratory support procedures that are still in use today.

Lessons learned from the successful polio vaccine experience not learned or applied with the development and implementation of the COVID-19 vaccines.

The eradication of polio during the latter half of the 20th century can be considered one of the greatest medical triumphs in history. This achievement can be attributed to the development of vaccines that received the public's almost unwavering acceptance of them, especially by parents who had been waiting/hoping for a medical breakthrough that would ensure that their children would not succumb to the devastating effects of infantile paralysis. Sixty years later, the worldwide population was now confronted with an equally devastating disease - Covid-19 - which by the 2020-2021 time period had reached pandemic levels not seen since the flu outbreak of 1918. Unlike polio, however, several vaccines against Covid-19 were rapidly developed and deployed due to advances in microbiologic and immunologic technology. But also, unlike the polio vaccine experience, there was not universal acceptance of the Covid-19 vaccines and this has led to continuation of the pandemic into 2023 (albeit at a reduced level). In addition, acceptance of the Covid-19 vaccines has been confronted with the uncertainty that they do not apparently prevent transmission in asymptomatic people, and the mutation rate of the virus requires periodic re-evaluation and possible upgrading of the vaccines. This review will focus on the various factors that have led to these contrasting attitudes toward these two different vaccines and how resistance and hesitancy to vaccine use can be overcome by implementing various measures, after introducing the key roles that the sciences of microbiology and immunology have played in vaccine development over the past 250+ years.

Historical Lessons on Vaccine Hesitancy: Smallpox, Polio, and Measles, and Implications for COVID-19.

Vaccine hesitancy continues to pose a formidable obstacle to increasing national COVID-19 vaccination rates in the US, but this is not the first time that American vaccination efforts have confronted resistance and apathy. This study examines the history of US vaccination efforts against smallpox, polio, and measles, highlighting persistent drivers of vaccine hesitancy as well as factors that helped overcome it. The research reveals that logistical barriers, negative portrayals in the media, and fears about safety stymied inoculation efforts as early as the 18th century and continue to do so. However, vaccine hesitancy has been markedly diminished when trusted community leaders have guided efforts, when ordinary citizens have felt personally invested in the success of the vaccine, and when vaccination efforts have been tied to broader projects to improve public health and social cohesion. Deliberately cultivating such factors could be an effective strategy for lessening opposition today, when COVID-19's distinctive characteristics make addressing vaccine hesitancy more urgent than it has ever been.

Between Simians and Cell Lines: Rhesus Monkeys, Polio Research, and the Geopolitics of Tissue Culture (1934-1954).

This essay argues that the racialized geopolitics of the rhesus monkey trade conditioned the trajectory of tissue culture in polio research. Rhesus monkeys from north India were important experimental organisms in the American "war against polio" between the 1930s and 1950s. During this period, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) expended considerable effort to secure the nonhuman primate for researchers' changing experimental agendas. The NFIP drew on transnational networks to export hundreds of thousands of rhesus monkeys from colonial and later postcolonial India amid the geopolitical upheavals of World War II, the 1947 Partition, and the Cold War. In this essay, I trace how NFIP officials' anxieties about the geopolitics of the monkey trade configured research imperatives in the war against polio. I show how their anxieties more specifically shaped investment in tissue culture techniques as a possible means of obviating dependence on the market in monkeys. I do so by offering a genealogy of the contingent convergence between the use of rhesus monkeys and HeLa cell cultures in the 1954 Salk vaccine trial evaluation. Through this genealogy, I emphasize the geopolitical dimensions of the search for the "right" experimental organisms, tissues, and cells for the "job" of scientific research. The technical transformation of polio research, I argue, relied on the convergence of disparate, racialized biomedical economies.

The Reign of the Ventilator: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, COVID-19, and Technological Imperatives in Intensive Care.

In the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, a dispute arose as to whether the disease caused a typical or atypical version of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This essay recounts the emergence of ARDS and places it in the context of the technological transformation of modern hospital care-particularly the emergence of intensive care after the 1952 Copenhagen polio epidemic. The polio epidemic seemed to show the value of manual positive-pressure ventilation, leading to the proliferation of mechanical ventilators and the expansion of intensive care units in the 1960s. This created the conditions of possibility for ARDS to be described and institutionalized within modern intensive care. Yet the centrality of the ventilator to descriptions and definitions of ARDS quickly made it difficult to conceive of the disorder outside the framework of mechanical ventilation and blood gas levels, or to acknowledge the degree to which the ventilator was a source of iatrogenic injury and complications. Moreover, the imperative to understand and treat ARDS with mechanical ventilation set the stage for the early confusion about whether patients with COVID-19 should receive mechanical ventilation. This history offers many crucial lessons about how new technologies can lead to new and valuable therapies but can also subtly shape and constrain medical thinking. Moreover, ventilators not only changed how respiratory disorders were conceived; they also brought new forms of respiratory illness into existence.

Historical Origins of the Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination Mandates: The View from California.

A number of states, starting with California, have recently removed all non-medical exemptions from their laws requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren. California was also one of the earliest states to include a broad non-medical, or personal, belief exemption in its modern immunization law, which it did with a 1961 law mandating polio vaccination for school enrollment, Assembly Bill 1940 (AB 1940). This paper examines the history of AB 1940's exemption clause as a case study for shedding light on the little-examined history of the personal belief exemption to vaccination in the United States. This history shows that secular belief exemptions date back further than scholars have allowed. It demonstrates that such exemptions resulted from political negotiation critical to ensuring compulsory vaccination's political success. It challenges a historiography in which antivaccination groups and their allies led late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century opposition to vaccination mandates while religious groups drove mid-twentieth century opposition. It also complicates the historiographic idea of a return to compulsion in the late 1960s, instead dating this return a decade earlier, to a time when belief exemptions in polio vaccination mandates helped reconcile the goal of a widely vaccinated population with the sacrosanct idea of health as a personal responsibility.

The WetNet: What the Oral Polio Vaccine Hypothesis Exposes about Globalized Interspecies Fluid Bonds.

The author analyzes the aftermath of Edward Hooper's suggestion that the trial of an oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the Belgian colonies of Africa engendered the pandemic form of the AIDS virus, HIV-1. In response to Hooper's book, The River (1999), the Royal Society in London held a conference to debate the origins of HIV. Examination of the quick dismissal of the OPV theory opens a space for legitimately challenging the widely held belief that the vaccine contamination question was convincingly resolved. This article interrogates the relationship between historiography and the making of scientific facts and history, suggesting that historians have been too credulous of scientists' testimony. The further result of the lack of a thorough analysis of the evidence backing the OPV hypothesis has resulted in a missed opportunity to read The River as one of the few detailed accounts of the immense social, political, technological, and interspecies infrastructure constituted by Cold War vaccine production. This biomedical infrastructure dramatically changed the geographic and interspecies mobility of viruses in ways that may be impossible to reconstruct. Yet these potential transmission routes remain crucial to acknowledge. The COVID-19 pandemic draws attention to the critical importance of studying The WetNet, a concept coined by the author to name the conceptual and material infrastructures of inter- and intraspecies fluid bonding.

Narrativas vacunales y políticas de vacunación contra la poliomielitis en el contexto de la provincia de Alicante (1963-1978) / Vaccine narratives and polio vaccination policies in the context of the province of Alicante (1963-1978)

El análisis a pequeña escala es una vía de abordaje historiográfico que abrió, en su momento, nuevos caminos en la investigación. La proximidad del objeto de estudio, permite profundizar en los determinantes propios y específicos y en las realidades y prácticas, por ejemplo, de las campañas de inmunización masiva contra la poliomielitis diseñada a nivel nacional pero implementadas localmente, como en el estudio de caso que abordamos. Utilizando como modelo el ámbito sanitario provincial de Alicante, el trabajo añade datos para completar la información de proximidad sobre estas campañas y de ese modo, completar una visión de conjunto y un análisis comparado tanto en un ámbito externo como en un ámbito interno interterritorial, nacional y provincial, así como el seguimiento de las directrices dadas por los organismos nacionales e internacionales. En segundo término, dotar de significado al conjunto de actividades llevadas a cabo por diferentes actores, instituciones y medios de comunicación, implicados en el proceso de implantación, cobertura y seguimiento de las campañas de vacunación contra la polio en el ámbito provincial alicantino. El uso de narrativas de personas afectadas por la enfermedad permite añadir elementos relevantes sobre experiencias personales en el contexto de las campañas vacunales

Small-scale analysis is a path of historiographical approach that opened, at the time, new paths in research. The proximity of the study object allows us to delve into our own and specific determinants and the realities and practices of, for example, mass immunization campaigns against polio, designed at the national level but implemented locally, as in the case study that we discuss. Using as a model the provincial sanitary area of Alicante, the work adds data to complete the proximity information on these campaigns and thus, complete an overview and a comparative analysis both in an external and in an internal interterritorial, national scope and provincial level as well as the follow-up of the guidelines given by the national and international organisms. Secondly, to give meaning to the set of activities carried out by different actors, institutions and media, involved in the process of implementation, coverage and follow-up of polio vaccination campaigns in the province of Alicante. The use of narratives of people affected by the disease allows to add relevant elements about personal experiences in the context of the vaccine campaigns

El papel desempeñado por los médicos, el gobierno y la OMS en la implementación de las encuestas serológicas sobre polio, sarampión y rubeola en España (1958-1978) / The role played by doctors, the government and the WWO in the implementation of poliomyelitis, measles and rubella serological surveys in Spain (1958-1978)

Las encuestas serológicas, que adquirieron gran relevancia a mediados del siglo XX, siguen siendo herramienta clave para abordar las enfermedades infecciosas. El artículo, utilizando fuentes archivísticas e impresas de la OMS, prensa médica y general, analiza el papel de médicos y científicos, gobierno y la OMS en la implementación de los estudios serológicos para evaluar la situación de la poliomielitis, sarampión y rubeola en España y establecer un plan de actuación contra ellas. El trabajo muestra el protagonismo de Florencio Pérez Gallardo y su grupo de la Escuela Nacional de Sanidad, privilegiado por el régimen franquista para recibir el apoyo de los programas colaborativos de la OMS, tras la entrada de España en ella en 1951, y el impacto de dichos programas en la transformación científico-profesional del núcleo virológico de Madrid, acompañado del establecimiento de nuevas instituciones, que permitieron modernizar la virología, paralelamente al desarrollo y ejecución de las encuestas serológicas mencionadas. El estudio revela igualmente el desarrollo paralelo de grupos científicos catalanes, que gozaron de reconocimiento internacional y dinamizaron la lucha contra las enfermedades estudiadas, pero también el papel clave de la circulación de los expertos de la OMS y los investigadores españoles para vehicular conocimiento científico y prácticas

Serological surveys, which acquired considerable importance in the mid twentieth century, are still a key tool to address infectious diseases. This article, using archival and printed sources from the WHO and the medical and general press, analyses the role of doctors and scientists, government, and the WHO in the implementation of serological surveys to evaluate the situation of poliomyelitis, measles and rubella in Spain and to set up a plan of action against them. The paper shows the role of Florencio Pérez Gallardo and his group at the National School of Health, favoured by the Franco regime to receive the support of WHO collaborative programmes after Spain joined in 1951, and the impact of these programmes on the scientific and professional transformation of the virological nucleus of Madrid, together with the establishment of new institutions enabling the modernisation of virology, in parallel with the development and execution of the serological surveys. The study also reveals the parallel development of Catalan scientific groups, who enjoyed international recognition and boosted the fight against the diseases studied, as well as the key role of the circulation of WHO experts and Spanish researchers in the spreading of scientific knowledge and practices

[Poliomyelitis in the Spanish press (1960-1975)]. / La poliomielitis en la prensa española (1960-1975).

OBJECTIVE: Vaccination has been one of the most effective preventive measures to reduce the number of diseases that affect humans. The primary objective of this study is to describe the informative treatment of polio in the written press at a time when it was of great importance. METHODS: From the digital newspaper archive of the ABC and La Vanguardia newspapers, all the information in which the concept "polio", published during the period between 1960 and 1975 was selected. RESULTS: In total there have been 961 units of analysis, 557 for the ABC newspaper and 404, for La Vanguardia. The year of greatest publication was the year 1963, coinciding with the authorization for the use of the Sabin vaccine. The need to intensify vaccination campaigns is highlighted as the number of annual cases continued to increase. CONCLUSIONS: There are no significant differences in the coverage of the newspaper ABC and La Vanguardia, following a pattern of publication very similar between them, where the Sabin vaccine appears as one of the most important scientific advances, thanks to which they allowed to protect children against to this dreaded disease, thus avoiding a major epidemic.

OBJETIVO: La vacunación ha sido una de las medidas preventivas más eficaces para disminuir el número de enfermedades que afectan a los seres humanos. El objetivo primordial de este estudio fue describir el tratamiento informativo de la poliomielitis en la prensa escrita de una época donde tuvo gran importancia. METODOS: A partir de la hemeroteca digital de los periódicos ABC y La Vanguardia se seleccionaron todas las informaciones en las que apareciera el concepto "poliomielitis", publicadas durante el periodo de tiempo comprendido entre 1960 y 1975. RESULTADOS: En total hubo 961 unidades de análisis, 557 para el periódico ABC y 404 para La Vanguardia. El año con más publicaciones fue 1963, coincidiendo con la autorización para la utilización de la vacuna Sabin. Se destaca la necesidad de intensificar las campañas de vacunación, ya que el número de casos anuales seguía aumentando. CONCLUSIONES: No existen diferencias significativas en las coberturas del periódico ABC y la de La Vanguardia, siguiendo un patrón de publicación muy parecido entre ellos, en donde la vacuna Sabin aparece como uno de los avances científicos más importantes. Gracias a ella se pudo proteger a los niños y niñas frente a esta temida enfermedad, evitando así una epidemia mayor.