HealthDay – by Dennis Thompson
Part two of a two-part series
TUESDAY, Dec. 2, 2014 (HealthDay News) — A nationwide trial of an experimental vaccine using school children as virtual guinea pigs would be unthinkable in the United States today.
But that’s exactly what happened in 1954 when frantic American parents — looking for anything that could beat back the horror of polio — offered up more than 1.8 million children to serve as test subjects. They included 600,000 kids who would be injected with either a new polio vaccine or a placebo. Continue reading “The Salk Polio Vaccine: ‘Greatest Public Health Experiment in History’”