2day 1955 Vaccine created by Jonas Salk against polio–scourge of the nation! is declared safe & effective! http://t.co/YgdJVEP3Il—
Hawkeye: JeSuisJuif (@inhuggermugger) April 13, 2015
In 1954, over 300,000 doctors, nurses, schoolteachers and other volunteers across the United States, Canada and Finland took part in one of the most complex and monumental medical trials in history.
The plan was to test the effectiveness of a newly-developed vaccine for a disease that was devastating the lives of children across the US: polio.
It was a mammoth task – a double-blind experiment, in which 650,000 schoolchildren were given the vaccine, 750,000 were given a placebo, and over 400,000 children acted as a control group and were given neither. For taking part, each participant was given a sweet and a certificate proclaiming their role as a‘Polio Pioneer’.
The results, announced in 1955, were just as monumental: the vaccine was safe and effective. As a direct result of the development of the vaccine, polio was completely eradicated in the US by 1979.
When I was in high school, we read I Can Jump Puddles (1955 ) – an autobiography by Alan Marshall. He contracted polio in 1908 at the age of 6. At the time, I didn’t really notice how recent the threat of polio was.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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