Polio Shot's 50th Anniversary

Fifty years later, graying adults smiled Monday as they recalled the experimental polio shots they got as second graders in America's battle against the mysterious killer, polio.

On April 26, 1954, scientists delivered what was called "the shot felt around the world." In the cafeteria of Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Va., a Washington suburb, a young physician gave the first inoculation of a vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.

"I know now it was really something important," said Dr. Richard Mulvaney, who helped vaccinate about 1.8 million children from 44 states. He was reunited Monday with men and women who were among those second graders 50 years ago.

In the first half of the 20th century, polio was a scourge that killed and paralyzed thousands. Children and parents were horrified by the prospect of life in an "iron lung," a metal ventilator where victims with collapsed respiratory systems lived, sometimes indefinitely.

On Monday, Jackie French Lonergan posed next to an enlarged black-and-white photograph of herself at age 7 with sleeve rolled up, bracing for the needle. The untested vaccine was considered by many parents less of a risk than the uncertainty of no protection at all.

"Children died, and I had a little friend in the hospital who did die," said Rita Bourgois, a polio survivor who fell ill at age 10, two days after her 12-year-old brother went to Children's Hospital in Washington with the disease in 1954. When they left the hospital three months later, Bourgois said doctors told her they were the only polio victims to walk out of the hospital that year.

The 1954 field trial was the largest voluntary clinical trial ever. The children who took the series of three shots became known as "Polio Pioneers." Mulvaney had served as a combat medic near the front lines of the Korean War just a few years earlier.

The trial was sponsored by the March of Dimes, a voluntary health agency founded in 1938 by President Franklin Roosevelt, who himself had been crippled by the disease in 1921 at age 39.

"My grandfather felt a special kinship with the victims of polio," said Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, a March of Dimes board member. She said he was passionate about preventing the disease and ending the epidemic.

In 1955, the Salk formula was declared "safe, potent and effective." A few years later, an oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin from live polio virus was introduced. The last polio case in the United States was recorded in 1979.

One of the most famous polio victims is the great violinist Itzhak Perlman, who was stricken at age 4 in his native Israel.

"My being disabled with polio basically did not do anything to make my career better or worse," Perlman told CBS News Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen last December, when he received a Kennedy Center Honor. "What it did cause was challenges in the very beginning."

The disease has been eradicated in every country except India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Niger and Nigeria, said Dr. Stephen L. Cochi of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC is marking National Infant Immunization Week through Saturday.