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Jonas Salks A Summer Plague: Polio Essay

Polio is known as the “crippling and potentially deadly infectious disease. It is caused by the poliovirus. The virus spreads from person to person and can invade an infected person’s brain and spinal cord, causing paralysis (can’t move parts of the body)”as said by the CDC. Jonas Salk encountered polio in everyday life and he started to create the vaccine. Now in the 21st century Polio is very rare and there is zero known cases in the US. Jonas Salk explored the many strings of the virus and used many dissimilar versions to create varying vaccines that could possibly work in destroying polio.

Before the initiation of the Polio vaccine it was not infrequent for someone to have been diagnosed. Daniel Salk, Jonas’s eldest son, was diagnosed with Polio, which caused Jonas to experiment on his own family first. Numerous kids were being affected by polio and many people wanted to find a way to prevent the virus, which is exactly what Salk did, he wanted to stop the exchange of polio. “In the 1952 Jonas Salk created a vaccine that was 80-90% effective in preventing Polio”, as said in the book History of Poliomyelitis by John Paul.

Salk created the Polio Vaccine to prevent the future generations from having Polio, he believed that no one should ever have to go through what his son went through. Polio is a very contagious virus, it can spread by the “contact with the stool of an infected person and droplets from a sneeze or cough. If you get stool or droplets from an infected person on your hands and you touch your mouth, you can get infected. ” as said by the CDC Website.

While the vaccine could also cause someone to have Polio, Jonas Salk helped many people when he created the vaccine because after the IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine), there was a large drop in people being diagnosed with the virus. Many people have or had been affected by Polio and when Jonas Salk created his cure, it gave hope to the people that there is a chance that this will one day poliomyelitis will be gone forever. First, The Polio virus created a social movement that affected the economy before and after the IPV. Many people were scared to come out of their homes in fear that they would “catch” poliomyelitis.

The impact of no one coming out of their homes’ was no one was moving in fear of the virus. This caused the tourist companies, Real Estate and small businesses to lose money. Lastly, Jobs were also a problem that people diagnosed with polio had to deal with, basically the people affected by Polio were never guaranteed a future. “All those people that were stricken with polio were out of the work force. “As said by Nora Hetterick. The IPV also helped the world save money, if eight million people were vaccinated, that means over billions of dollars are saved on treatments and there are gains in productivity.

Since the year 1988 over 99% of polio was reduced, and in several years polio will be eradicated, only small, low income countries have yet to be treated. A little more than 200 cases have been filed since the vaccine ,and all of the cases have occurred in people over fifteen years of age. Polio ,in very short terms, was a pandemic until Jonas Salk. The United States spent a large amount of money on the Polio vaccinations which had a large impact on our economy, which the government found worth it to prevent Poliomyelitis in the future. A quote that can tell you how much America spent on the IPV.

We estimate that the United States invested approximately US dollars 35 billion (1955 net present value, discount rate of 3%) in polio vaccines between 1955 and 2005 and will invest approximately US dollars 1. 4 billion (1955 net present value, or US dollars 6. 3 billion in 2006 net present value) between 2006 and 2015 assuming a policy of continued use of inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) for routine vaccination. The historical and future investments translate into over 1. 7 billion vaccinations that prevent approximately 1. 1 million cases of aralytic polio and over 160,000 deaths (1955 net present values of approximately 480,000 cases and 73,000 deaths). Next, Jonas Salk was known as a blessing to many families when he created the Polio vaccine. Polio is a disease that may cause the spine to be weakened making a person paralyzed, or not able to move some parts of the body.

“Jonas Salk now belonged to the public, to humanity, more than to science. We love this young man in white-a hero of test-tube magic, a savior of little children, yet a modest person who asked nothing but to be left alone with his cherished research. As said in the book A Summer Plague: Polio and the Survivors by Tony Gould. Before the IPV the kids that had polio caused things like the game Candy Land, and Milky Way bars to be invented for entertainment, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt also had an impact because a coin was made in his honor of his fight of Polio during his Presidency of twelve years. Polio also made the clothing companies create different size clothing, for example shoes were created in two different sizes for one person to fit the needs of the different body types diagnosed with polio.

Another social impact was that some public spaces were made to adapt to people that had polio, for example the reserved area in a public bathroom, or the two different heights of water fountains. It also allowed for the physicians to improve on the “Iron Lung” a device that helped people that were able to get to the doctor before the later stages of polio. “Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw at Harvard University devised a version of a tank respirator that could maintain respiration artificially until a person could breathe independently, usually after one or two weeks.

Therefore, Jonas Salk created the vaccine to help people that were disabled by Polio. Nora Hetterick went to a school of forty kids and she said, “At least three in every grade at my school were affected by polio. ” That means that a little over 20% were affected in her school. Men, women, and children that were diagnosed with Polio were closed off and they were not allowed to go to church and people that did not have any version of polio were afraid to talk to the people that did have polio just because they were influenced by the dreadful virus before the IPV.

An example of the hardships of polio can be looked at in a woman named Joann Hall, a sixteen year old woman. She celebrated her sixteenth birthday in a wheelchair at a hospital. Hall remarked, “They gave me a spinal tap… and diagnosed me with bulbar and paralytic polio. It just progressed from there that night. I was hurting so bad I could not walk. … With the lights in the nurses’ station and the nurses communicating with each other and laughing and such, well, I just felt like I was the most abandoned person in the world. This young women was very young and experienced polio, sadly this is what some of the diagnosed experienced before the IPV and the ‘Reserved Areas. ‘ She is one of the many that were diagnosed, there were about 2,500 cases in 1957 and “by 1965 there were only about 61 cases of Polio were reported. ” Lastly, The political impact of polio can be looked at in Nigeria, a country in West Africa. Polio has been dealt with in many of the countries around the world. It originally was expected to be demolished in 2000, but that date has soon been forgotten.

The hardest place to get the polio virus has been in Nigeria, tension has arisen and now the people of the African country are informing people to avoid getting the polio vaccine because they believe it could cause Polio as much as it could help. The vaccine has been given to be all around the world and from one country, that is thought to have started it, has avoided it, it is starting to spread to other countries “that were once polio-free” as said by the Centre for International Health. Jonas Salk created the polio vaccine to help people, not just for his own reward.

Today Polio has almost been completely eradicated and the cases of polio are dropping everyday. The last case known in the United States was in 1979. There are still parts of the world that have polio because they have yet to receive the IPV. Jonas Salk is a man of the people, he understood the problem and he found the solution with determination and hard work. Salk made it to where today it is normal for a high school student to get vaccinated for polio, and he made it to where polio is a very rare occurrence in the world, so it is thought by the year 2030 polio will be demolished forever.

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