Albert Sabin M.D. (1906-1993)
Polish-born physician and virologist Albert Sabin developed the first effective and widely used live virus poliomyelitis (polio) vaccine that was taken orally. (OPV)
 Albert Sabin researched the pathology of the polio virus at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City in 1935 and four years later at the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was there that he proved that polio viruses not only grew in nerve tissue, as was generally assumed, but that they lived in the small intestines. This discovery indicated that polio might be vulnerable to a vaccine taken orally (through the mouth). The outbreak of the Second word war interrupted the polio research which was resumed after the war.
At the war's end Sabin returned to Cincinnati to continue his research on the polio virus. His approach was to make the human gut a hostile environment for the polio virus by isolating a mutant (altered, different) form of the polio virus that was incapable of producing the disease. The avirulent (not able to harm the body's defenses) virus would then be grown and introduced into the intestines orally where the normal immune sytem was able to produce its own antibodies protecting the human host from the disease.
There were advantages to this method of immunisation because not only would it give the recipient of the vaccine greater long term immunity, it also killed the more virulent forms of polio virus and also stopped infection being passed on through the feaces, which the Salk vaccine did not.
The first trials were conducted in Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany from 1957 to 1959. A much smaller group in Sweden, England, Singapore, and the United States received Sabin's vaccine by the end of 1959.
Another advantage with Allbert Sabin's method of oral polio vaccine or OPV, it can be easily administered, unlike IPV which requires qualified and trained medical staff to administer.
This method is still widely used today as the WHO has embarked upon the global eradication of polio in 1988. When the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched, wild poliovirus was endemic in more than 125 countries on five continents, paralyzing more than 1000 children every day.
By the end of 2006, only four countries remained, which had never interrupted endemic transmission of wild poliovirus (Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan). In 2006, fewer than 2000 cases were reported. There is still an ongoing programme to bring the success of eradication in the other countries to the four counties where it is still endemic.
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