Who Discovered the Cure for Polio?

Who discovered the cure for polio? According to eMed TV, the only cure for polio is the cure your body creates over time, as your body fights the polio virus. However, while there is no cure for polio, someone did discover a vaccine for polio that all but eradicated the illness. This man, therefore, can be considered the one who discovered a "cure" for polio in a sense. That man's name is Jonas Salk.

We know that there is no cure for polio, and no one who invented the cure for polio. In 1952 there were 60,000 cases of polio in the United States, and over 3,000 deaths as a result of polio; however, polio is almost unheard of in today’s world.  So, how did we all but eliminate polio? A man named Jonas Salk invented a vaccine that, while it doesn't cure polio, does prevent it. Therefore, Salk can be considered the man who invented a cure for polio.

Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine

The inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, was a Jewish American doctor.   Originally intending to become a lawyer when he went to college, he quickly found that medicine fascinated him more, and he began his studies in medicine in New York. 

• He spent a year researching influenza, the flu virus that had killed millions of people in America in 1918 and 1919. 
• In doing so, he learned that the flu virus could be immobilized and then injected as a vaccine into healthy people in order to build their immune systems against the vaccine.
• Salk moved to the University of Pittsburgh after the Second World War, and he began working on his polio vaccine there as part of his research. 
• After eight long years of work, he was finally able to create a successful polio vaccine in 1955, using a vaccine made of a dead polio virus that was administered by means of a shot. 
• While it was debated whether or not this method would fully immunize everyone against the vaccine, a live test with an orally administered vaccine using live virus cultures actually infected and killed a number of people, so Salk’s dead virus vaccine was determined to be the best way to use the virus.

Widespread Use of the Polio Vaccine

Salk, the man who invented the polio vaccine, did not take money for his vaccine, and chose not to patent it or otherwise try to profit from it.  Instead, he asked that it be spread as widely as possible in order to make sure that no one would ever die from polio again. 

In 1963, Salk went on to found the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and when he died in 1995 at the age of 80, he was still working on a vaccine, this time for the AIDS virus, which has become the polio of the modern generation.

Polio was one of the most feared diseases throughout the world in the 1950s.  Polio, the full name of which is poliomyelitis, is a virus that infected children, typically in the warm summer days, and which could cause full or partial paralysis. Once infected, polio would attack the nervous system of children who had been exposed to the virus.  Fortunately, because of Jonas Salk and his hard work and humanitarian nature, polio became a thing of the past.