Polio

March 14, 2005
A case of polio in Mecca during this year's hajj and the threat of the disease spreading received major attention in the New York Times.
This is the year the World Health Organization has targeted for the elimination of polio worldwide, and 2005 is the 50th anniversary of the polio vaccine—which publishers are celebrating, perhaps prematurely. PW
gave a starred review to Jeffrey Kluger's Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
. Here are three more books on polio.
POLIO: An American Story
David M. Oshinsky
. Oxford Univ.
, $30 (432p) ISBN 0-19-515294-8

The key protagonists in historian Oshinsky's (Univ. of Texas, Austin) account of the bruising scientific race to create a vaccine are Jonas Salk, a proponent of a "killed-virus" vaccine, and Albert Sabin, who championed the "live-virus" vaccine. As revered as these men are in popular culture, Oshinsky records their contemporaries' less complimentary opinions (even Sabin's friends, for instance, describe him as "arrogant, egotistical and occasionally cruel"). Oshinsky (A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
, etc.) looks at social context, too, such as the impact of the March of Dimes campaign on public consciousness—and fear—of polio. Tying in the role polio victim FDR played in making the effort a national priority, the precursory scientific developments that aided Salk and Sabin's work, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding human testing, Oshinsky sometimes bogs down in details. But all in all, this is an edifying description of one of the most significant public health successes in U.S. history. 46 b&w photos not seen by PW.

April 1, 2005
The 50th anniversary of the approval of the Salk vaccine has inspired several authors to take a fresh look at the history of polio. While Jeffrey Kluger's recent "Splendid Solution" focuses on Jonas Salk and the challenges he faced, prize-winning author Oshinsky (history, Univ. of Texas, Austin) here provides a broader view of the search for a polio vaccine -and an objective and highly readable one at that. Relying heavily on personal papers from the archival collections of nearly every major player in the polio story, he covers the early days of the creation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and its fund-raising efforts through the controversy over the pros and cons of killed versus live virus vaccines, before ending with a look at post-polio syndrome and the current status of the disease. Libraries with large health science collections will want both Kluger's and Oshinsky's analyses, but smaller libraries with limited budgets will be better served by Oshinsky's. [This month, the University of Chicago Press is publishing Daniel Wilson's "Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors"; in June, Harvard University Press will publish Marc Shell's "Polio and Its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture". -Ed.] -Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2005
Adult/High School -This well-grounded account documents the quest for a polio vaccine. It reveals professional rivalries and clinical breakthroughs, describes a new era in approaches to public philanthropy, and re-creates the tenor of American culture during the 1940s and '50s, when every city, suburb, and rural community faced potential tragedy from annual outbreaks of the disease. The decades-long contentious relationship between doctors Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk provides the centerpiece of this story. Virologists were split into two main camps: those pursuing the development of an attenuated live-virus vaccine versus those focusing on a killed-virus vaccine, with adherents of the latter believing it would prove not only safer and more effective, but also quicker and cheaper to mass produce. Historical context is provided by detailing how Franklin D. Roosevelt raised public awareness, how his influence led to the emergence of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the March of Dimes, and the subsequent creation of the -poster child - concept as a way of creating grassroots fundraising. The writing dramatically captures both tensions and ethical dimensions inherent in moving from laboratory work with monkeys to human experimentation and, eventually, to implementation of a massive inoculation program reaching 1.3 million schoolchildren in the 1954 Salk vaccine trials. While this part of the story and the public adulation of Salk have been told elsewhere, Oshinsky amplifies the tale with data explaining why the Sabin oral vaccine became the one preeminently adopted internationally, and why the debate has continued. Sixteen pages of arresting black-and-white photographs are included." -Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA"

Copyright 2005 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2005
The success of the enormous 1954 field test of the killed-virus polio vaccine developed in the Pittsburgh laboratory of Jonas Salk made him iconically famous. At center stage in journalist Jeffrey Kluger's gripping" Splendid Solution " [BKL F 1 05], Salk is only chronologically central in historian Oshinsky's effort, which expands, as Kluger doesn't, on the half-century after Salk's achievement, in particular. Oshinsky shows first that polio was, even at its most prevalent, a relatively low-incidence disease and that the happenstance that it struck Franklin Roosevelt (or did it? Some question the diagnosis) was crucial to making it as dreaded as it was. Roosevelt was also crucial to setting the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis going, with his aggressive law partner, Basil O'Connor, in charge. While Kluger emphasizes the foundation's good works, Oshinsky points up its inspired fund-raising and PR. During the final push to produce a vaccine, Oshinsky illuminates Salk's competitors more than Kluger, and after Salk's triumph, he turns to Albert Sabin, whose live-virus vaccine became officially preferred before mass immunization with Salk's was finished. He confirms what Kluger skirted, that Sabin was a real SOB as well as a good scientist, but, unlike Kluger, he airs trenchant criticism of Salk, too. Further, he brings the story down to the recent reemergence of Salk's vaccine and the present, when the WHO hopes for polio's ultimate eradication in 2008. Narrative history doesn't get much better. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)