News: Man who helped create polio vaccine dies
Before doctors Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed the vaccines that have no doubt prevented millions and millions of people from getting polio, there was Dr. Thomas H. Weller. He and two other researchers shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine for the breakthrough that led to the polio vaccine.
He died Saturday at age 93.
Kudos.
August 25th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
1854 or do you mean 1954?
August 25th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
He won the 1854 prize for “mdedicine” and the 1954 prize for medicine.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:57 am
From the linked article:
Weller and colleagues also were the first to grow varicella (chicken pox virus) in tissue culture, and Weller was also on the team that first isolated rubella (German measles). So Weller participated in instrumental discoveries leading to THREE important vaccines.
Wow. Can you imagine having such an amazing impact on the lives of children? Too bad a bunch of Luddites want to erode these amazing accomplishments.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:37 am
[...] Hat Tip: the Pundit. [...]
August 26th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Knight -
He was an amazing man with a major impact on child immunization and overall children’s health and life span worldwide. While I can agree that polio (and measles to almost a similar extent) should be immunized against, I haven’t seen any good data to show the health impact of failure to immunize against chicken pox. In the vast majority of cases, it is a minor annoyance but definately not life threatening or life altering. In that case, I think the individuals right overwhelms any “public” heath issue.
Am I missing something here?
August 27th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Before the varicella vaccine, chicken pox killed somewhere between 100 & 200 people every year … not including varicella-induced miscarriages. It also caused many hospitalizations (tens of thousands annually) and medical office visits (hundreds of thousands annually) … not to mention all the lost school days for the kids and lost work days for the parents. There is no truly effective treatment for varicella, although acyclovir and similar anti-virals have some benefit for shingles and disseminated varicella infections.
I missed nearly two full weeks of school when I had chicken pox in 1980. My college roommate didn’t get it until he was 21, and he had to be hospitalized for several days and was out of action for nearly a month.
No, chicken pox vaccination doesn’t have the major impact that polio and measles vaccination did, but I’d say it’s worthwhile. I’ve seen less than a dozen cases of chicken pox and a half-dozen cases of shingles since I began my medical career, and most of those were very mild cases that broke through vaccine immunity.
I see it as a sign of progress that we’re now targeting viruses like varicella and rotavirus that are major causes of morbidity but not necessarily mortality.