Good morning, Whitewater
It’s the last day of school before a two-day break, and there will be any number of Halloween parties, parades throughout the district.
On this day in 1914, Dr. Jonas Salk was born. Here’s more about his accomplishments, from the New York Times:
As an intense 40-year-old scientist, Dr. Salk became a revered medical figure upon the announcement in 1955 that his new polio vaccine was safe and effective. It was a turning point in the fight against a disease that condemned some victims to live the rest of their lives in tanklike breathing machines called iron lungs and placed sunny swimming holes off limits to children because of parents’ fears of contagion.
The Salk vaccine changed medical history, preventing many thousands of cases of crippling illness and saving thousands of lives. In the United States, the vaccine soon ended the yearly threat of epidemics and the toll of paralysis and death.
In the five years before 1955, when mass inoculations with the vaccine began, cases of paralytic polio averaged about 25,000 a year in the United States. A few years after polio vaccination became routine, the annual number of cases dropped to a dozen or so, sometimes fewer. In 1969 not a single death from polio was reported in the nation, the first such year on record, and now the disease is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide.
Success against polio was a critical event in the dawning of the modern era of vaccine development, which has been marked by effective preventatives against a broad range of other infectious diseases, including influenza, measles, mumps and rubella.
Paralytic polio was known as early as the time of ancient Egypt. In America it was never as widespread a disease as influenza or measles. In the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, however, outbreaks of the disease came, increasingly, in frightening epidemics. Many children and young adults died, were crippled or paralyzed.
Some expected the decade of the 1950’s to be even worse, and in the epidemic of 1952, the worst on record, nearly 58,000 cases of polio were reported in the United States; more than 3,000 died of the disease.
The turning point in the battle against polio was probably the day, April 12, 1955, when Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. of the University of Michigan announced at a news conference in Ann Arbor the successful results of a field trial in which 440,000 American children had been injected with Dr. Salk’s new vaccine. The $7.5 million project was the climactic effort of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which later changed its focus to birth defects and became the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation.
Here’s today’s almanac:
| Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | Sunrise | Sunset |
|---|---|---|
| Official Time | 07:23 AM | 05: 53 PM |
| Civil Twilight | 06:54 AM | 06:22 PM |
| Tomorrow | 07:25 AM | 05:51 PM |
| Tomorrow will be: | 4 minutes shorter | |
| Amount of sunlight: | 10 h 30 m | |
| Amount of daylight: | 11 h 28 m | |
| Moon phase: | Waxing gibbous | |