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When the Fear of Polio Gripped the World, Jonas Salk’s Determination Led to a Liberating Medical Breakthrough
Key takeaways
- Peter Salk, as told to Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
- One summer, my parents refused to take us to an amusement park, in an effort to avoid exposure to polio.
- My brothers and I received our first injections of the experimental vaccine in 1953, when I was 9.
Peter Salk, as told to Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
Add as preferred source. A photo illustration of Jonas Salk. Illustration by Julie Murphy; Photo Source: AP Images In 1952, around 58,000 American children contracted polio. More than 21,000 were paralyzed and 3,000 died. The disease would start like a cold, and then, all of a sudden, children couldn’t breathe or couldn’t move their arms and legs. Because polio epidemics happened sporadically, parents never knew when the next one would take place. Where would it happen? Would their own children be stricken? Parents lived with enormous fear.
My father, Jonas Salk, shared that fear. One summer, my parents refused to take us to an amusement park, in an effort to avoid exposure to polio. But my father was different from other parents in one significant way: He was working on a vaccine that could keep a polio epidemic from ever happening again.