Polio Progress

Like birds in the spring, polio moves northward over the nation from the South. This year, the fifth since Salk vaccine was introduced, it began in Florida and southern Texas, hit hardest at Mexicans. Last week it struck the Middle West, with concentrated epidemics among slum-dwelling Negroes in Des Moines and Kansas City. At week's end the U.S. Public Health Service reported that thus far in 1959 there have been 855 polio cases (574 paralytic) as against 588 (297 paralytic) in the same period last year.

More and more apparent to polio researchers is the fact that the disease no longer hits communities as a whole, but seems to localize among lower economic groups. The reason: slum dwellers have usually not been vaccinated, while higher income groups have (TIME, Nov. 24).

National Immunity. Another theory developed in current polio studies: the big U.S. epidemics from 1948 to 1955 provided a kind of national immunity. Although 39 out of 100,000 people suffered serious attacks of the disease in those years, 500 to 1,000 out of every 100,000 got mild infections without knowing it and built up an immunity. Since 1955, the heaviest incidence of polio has been among children still unborn at the time of the big epidemics. Researchers note that in the first post-Salk vaccine year (1956), the worst polio was among one-year-olds, and in the second, among one-and two-year-olds. Now it is worst among the one-to three-year-olds. Bowing to the statistics, the Public Health Service has recommended that doctors begin polio shots for youngsters two to three months old along with vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.

Despite the continuance of polio, Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney of the PHS said last week that the Salk killed-virus vaccine has proved 90% effective. The trouble is that an estimated 40 million Americans in the susceptible undergo age group have not taken the shots.

In Baby's Formula? Pushing for adoption of live-virus vaccine in the U.S. is Lederle Laboratories, which last week announced that it will boost its live-virus vaccine outlay to $8,000,000, build new production and testing facilities to produce annually 40 million oral doses of vaccine that offer immunity to the three types of polio viruses (TIME, March 16). Lederle has tested the live-virus vaccine on 700,000 people, is hopeful that current tests in South America and the U.S. will prove its effectiveness and safety. Said Lederle General Manager Lyman C. Duncan: "The day is nearing when every newborn infant will be given half a teaspoonful of a clear liquid in his formula or drinking water before he leaves the hospital, which will protect him from paralytic polio during his childhood years."

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