How A Pittsburgh-Made Polio Vaccine Helped Beat A Disease That Terrified A Nation
90.5 WESA | By Margaret J. Krauss
“When Dr. Julius Youngner moved to Pittsburgh in 1949, he thought he’d be in the city for two years. Though a commissioned officer in the Public Health Service at the Cancer Institute, he wanted to work on viruses and took a position in a University of Pittsburgh lab directed by Dr. Jonas E. Salk, developing a vaccine for polio, said Youngner.
‘And the rest is history,’ he said from his Squirrel Hill living room, 66 years later.
Patsy Murr, first grader at Fulton School in Lancaster, Pa., gets her Salk shot from Dr. Norman E. Snyder as she is held by Mrs. Walter Sourweine, April 25, 1955. Others view the proceedings with mixed emotions.
The Fifth Avenue lab where he and the original five-person team worked was located below a ward of polio patients who couldn’t breathe on their own. Machines, ‘iron lungs’ did it for them, said Youngner.
‘They had these machines that drove the in and out of breathing,’ he said. ‘I mean it just kept them alive.’
The ward was enormously loud. The machines created a terrible din and drove home the reality of the disease, Youngner said.
“We had motivation right there in the building," he said. "Everybody was very serious about what we were doing. I never worked so hard in my life. I worked seven days a week.”
Polio is caused by a virus that lives in the throat and intestine. It attacks the nervous system and can result in paralysis. Children are most at risk. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, prevalence of the disease increased, said Youngner.
“People were so afraid of their kids getting polio during the summertime, they wouldn’t let them go to swimming pools,” he said, trying to explain how polio affected society in those years. “They wouldn’t let them go to movies, they tried to keep them away from other kids. People were hysterically afraid of it.”
So much so that they sought any protection. When he was a boy, Youngner’s grandmother used to tie a cake of camphor around his neck when he went out to play, he said.
“What she didn’t know is that when I left the house, I would take the thing off and put it in the mailbox,” he said. “And put it on again when I came home. But she was convinced for the rest of her life that she had kept me from getting polio, and that was nice.”
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