Author: Thomas Abraham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1787380874
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
In 1988, the World Health Organization launched a twelve-year campaign to wipe out polio. Thirty years and several billion dollars over budget later, the campaign grinds on, vaccinating millions of children and hoping that each new year might see an end to the disease. But success remains elusive, against a surprisingly resilient virus, an unexpectedly weak vaccine and the vagaries of global politics, meeting with indifference from governments and populations alike. How did an innocuous campaign to rid the world of a crippling disease become a hostage of geopolitics? Why do parents refuse to vaccinate their children against polio? And why have poorly paid door-to-door healthworkers been assassinated? Thomas Abraham reports on the ground in search of answers.
Author: New York (N.Y.). Department of Health
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Epidemics
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Author: Paul A. Offit
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300126051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, thathas led many pharmaceutical companies to abandon vaccine manufacture. Drawing on interviews with public health officials, pharmaceutical company executives, attorneys, Cutter employees, and victims of the vaccine, as well as on previously unavailable archives, Dr. Paul Offit offers a full account of the Cutter disaster. He describes the nation's relief when the polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in 1955, the production of the vaccine at industrial facilities such as the one operated by Cutter, and the tragedy that occurred when 200,000 people were inadvertently injected with live virulent polio virus: 70,000 became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died. Dr. Offit also explores how, as a consequence of the tragedy, one jury's verdict set in motion events that eventually suppressed the production of vaccines already licensed and deterred the development of new vaccines that hold the promise of preventing other fatal diseases.
Author: Naomi Rogers
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813517865
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Dirt and Disease is a social, cultural, and medical history of the polio epidemic in the United States. Naomi Rogers focuses on the early years from 1900 to 1920, and continues the story to the present. She explores how scientists, physicians, patients, and their families explained the appearance and spread of polio and how they tried to cope with it. Rogers frames this study of polio within a set of larger questions about health and disease in twentieth-century American culture.
Author: Dóra Vargha
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108420842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Through the lens of polio, Dóra Vargha looks anew at international health, communism and Cold War politics. This title is also available as Open Access.
Author: New York (N.Y.). Department of Health
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030747500X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
Author: Daniel J. Wilson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226901033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Polio was the most dreaded childhood disease of twentieth-century America. Every summer during the 1940s and 1950s, parents were terrorized by the thought that polio might cripple their children. They warned their children not to drink from public fountains, to avoid swimming pools, and to stay away from movie theaters and other crowded places. Whenever and wherever polio struck, hospitals filled with victims of the virus. Many experienced only temporary paralysis, but others faced a lifetime of disability. Living with Polio is the first book to focus primarily on the personal stories of the men and women who had acute polio and lived with its crippling consequences. Writing from personal experience, polio survivor Daniel J. Wilson shapes this impassioned book with the testimonials of more than one hundred polio victims, focusing on the years between 1930 and 1960. He traces the entire life experience of the survivors—from the alarming diagnosis all the way to the recent development of post-polio syndrome, a condition in which the symptoms of the disease may return two or three decades after they originally surfaced. Living with Polio follows every physical and emotional stage of the disease: the loneliness of long separations from family and friends suffered by hospitalized victims; the rehabilitation facilitieswhere survivors spent a full year or more painfully trying to regain the use of their paralyzed muscles; and then the return home, where they were faced with readjusting to school or work with the aid of braces, crutches, or wheelchairs while their families faced the difficult responsibilities of caring for and supporting a child or spouse with a disability. Poignant and gripping, Living with Polio is a compelling history of the enduring physical and psychological experience of polio straight from the rarely heard voices of its survivors.
Author: Jeffrey Kluger
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440684650
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
The compelling true story of Dr. Jonas Salk's quest to develop a vaccine for polio. In 1916, the United States was hit with one of the worst polio epidemics in history. The disease was a terrifying enigma: striking out of nowhere, it afflicted tens of thousands of children and left them—literally overnight—paralyzed. Others it simply killed. At the same time, a child named Jonas Salk was born.... When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio shortly before assuming the Presidency, Salk was given an impetus to study this deadly illness. After assisting in the creation of an influenza vaccine, Salk took up the challenge. His progress in combating the virus was hindered by the politics of medicine and by a rival researcher determined to discredit his proposed solution. But Salk's perseverance made history—and for close to seventy years his vaccine has saved countless lives, bringing humanity close to eradicating polio throughout the world. Splendid Solution chronicles Dr. Salk's race against time to achieve an unparalleled breakthrough that made him a cultural hero and icon of modern medicine.
Author: Hongjun Li
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401798826
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 663
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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive overview of diagnostic imaging in infectious diseases. It starts with a general review of infectious diseases, including their classification, characteristics and epidemiology. In separate chapters, the authors then introduce the radionuclide imaging of 50 kinds of infectious diseases. Volume 1 covers 21 viral infections. Volume 2 has 29 chapters discussing 24 bacterial infections and 5 parasitic infections. Each disease is clearly illustrated using cases combined with high-quality computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The book provides a valuable reference source for radiologists and doctors working in the area of infectious diseases.
