What is the difference between salk and sabin vaccines

DOI: Lab Report. Kelly Malcom. November 17, PM. Getty Images. Infectious Disease. Sabin and the Cold War Because Salk vaccine was used so extensively in the United States, Sabin had to go overseas in the late s to find people for his clinical trials, in the Belgian Congo and, on a massive scale, in the Soviet Union.

An American was able to conduct an extensive polio vaccine trial in the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war because the fear of polio was stronger than political differences. Mikhail Chumakov to Albert Sabin, letter of December 26, In the first five months of , ten million children in the Soviet Union received the Sabin oral vaccine.

Albert Sabin received a medal in gratitude from the Russian government during the height of the cold war. Killed or Live Vaccine? He began to grow and test many virus strains in animals and tissue cultures and eventually found three mutant strains of the virus that appeared to stimulate antibody production without causing paralysis. Sabin then tested these strains on humans: his subjects included himself and his family, research associates, and prisoners from the nearby Chillicothe Penitentiary.

Hauck Center for the Albert B. Sabin Archives, Henry R. After the Soviet trial succeeded in , the U. In the late s Sabin entered into an agreement with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to produce his live-virus vaccine. He presented Pfizer with the master strains of the virus, and the company began to perfect its production technique in its British facilities. In the WHO declared that naturally occurring poliovirus had been eradicated from the Western Hemisphere owing to repeated mass immunization campaigns with the Sabin vaccine in Central and South America.

The only occurrences of paralytic poliomyelitis in the West after this time were the few cases caused by the live-virus vaccine itself. During his lifetime Sabin staunchly defended his live-virus vaccine, refusing to believe any evidence that it could cause paralytic poliomyelitis. Salk, for his part, believed that killed-virus vaccine produced equivalent protection in individuals and in communities without any risk for causing paralysis.

On the basis of a decade of additional evidence, this recommendation was reconfirmed in Although he was the first to produce a polio vaccine, Salk did not win the Nobel Prize or become a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Salk spent the later years of his life committed to developing a killed-virus vaccine to prevent the development of AIDS in those infected with human immunodeficiency virus.

Sabin, too, continued his work and held a series of influential positions at such organizations as the Weizmann Institute of Science, the U. Historian Bert Hansen mines magazines, newspapers, comic books, and movies to catch a glimpse of science as imagined by earlier generations. Explore the oral history collection at the Science History Institute, with interviews dating back to Skip to main content.

Smallpox, polio, and the political and scientific haggling behind two medical triumphs. In he became a U. Salk and Sabin both became interested in research early in their careers. In his final year of medical school, Salk was exposed to Thomas Francis, Jr.

Francis had made his name by discovering a new type of influenza virus. At the time, the only available anti-viral vaccines — smallpox, rabies and yellow fever — relied on weakened or attenuated virus inoculations. Salk would ultimately follow Francis to the University of Michigan before moving to Pittsburgh to start his own research laboratory.

While at Rockefeller, Sabin became convinced of the inherent superiority of attenuated over killed virus vaccines. Like Salk, Sabin would keep this belief, embraced early in his research career, throughout his professional life. In he left to start his own laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. On arriving at Pittsburgh, Salk and his team worked assiduously to develop a killed virus vaccine.

They inactivated the virus with formalin and began conducting field trials, sometimes at facilities of the disabled or mentally infirm. Sabin viewed this as an opportunity to undermine Salk. He wrote immediately to Aims McGuinness, a powerful leader in the American Academy of Pediatrics, to raise concerns about the validity of the formalin inactivation. It should be acknowledged that Sabin was almost a decade older than Salk and was considered the more experienced investigator. Early on, he criticized Salk at medical conferences and questioned the durability of killed vaccine titers.

Francis announced that the killed vaccine was safe, potent, and effective. Salk immediately became a celebrity and national hero. But resentment awaited him. Although he acknowledged the contributions of his team when he accepted the inevitable accolades, he failed to identify them by name. An intense investigation followed and implicated only vaccines produced by Cutter Laboratories and caused by a deviation from the Salk protocol.