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The First Epidemics: Poliomyelitis Virus

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The First Epidemics: Poliomyelitis has a root meaning: “polio” (gray) and “myelitis” (marrow). Its Latin suffix “itis” is describing the inflammation that occurs and “polio” means there is an enteric infection, which is a virus. A virus is a small infectious agent that can reproduce inside a many living organisms. With the polio virus it attacks various nervous cells and in some cases it can even sometimes affect the central nervous system. Virus could not be seen until the late 1930s when the electronic microscope was invented. So it was very difficult for people to result these kinds of diseases. The polio virus attacks the body by entering the mouth and then traveling into the digestive tract. It is then excreted through stool. …show more content…
Thomas Francis Jr. with an outbreak of polio in Pennsylvania at a summer camp in 1947. The camp notified that National Foundation who then contacted Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. because he had been studying different vaccinations to cure diseases. Francis and Salk traveled in the hopes of find the source of where polio was coming from. They wanted to find the source of why a certain area was containing the polio virus and why it was thriving there. Francis had some ideas from where the virus was originated from along with the ideas of Salk who thought the virus came from the weakening of the body’s immune system caused by certain foods and allergies. In 1947 after Salk’s apprenticeship Salk became the director of the Virus research laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh school of Medicine. This is when Salk first began researching the polio vaccine. With his researching progressing Harvard researchers made a breakthrough with the polio virus. With the new breakthrough concerning the virus it helped Salk speed up his research with the vaccination. Salk used the method where he used formaldehyde to kill the virus but kept it intact enough to trigger a body response. In 1952 Salk had a trail run on children who already had polio. From this run there was a positive result, antibodies had increased. Salk conducted another set of tests where he gave the vaccination to people who did not have polio. He gave the vaccination to …show more content…
Long Term Effects since the Discovery of the Polio Vaccine:
• Since the discovery of the polio vaccine it has saved many lives. The vaccination is so accessible to people and it distributed throughout the world. The polio vaccination is still recommend for people to get worldwide due to the fear of the disease being spread. The United State recommends children between the ages of 2 months to 4 months and then twice more before they enter elementary school.
• The amount of polio cases has decreased by 99% since 1988 which is an equivalent to 350,000 cases to 359 cases that were reported in 2014.
• The polio vaccine has been spread worldwide. There are only two countries that still are polio-endemic, Afghanistan and Pakistan. o If one child still remains infected with the virus. There still is a chance that other people could be effected by the disease.
• There is no cure for polio, however it can be prevented with a vaccine given several

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