PUNJABIMUNDANO1
Banned
Sir Jonas Salk the inventor of Polio Vaccine
When he was asked about having the patent of his invention , His answer was "Could u patent the Sun?"
Personal life
Jonas Salk was born in New York City on October 28, 1914. His parents, Daniel and Dora (ne Press) Salk, were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Poland who had not received extensive formal education.[SUP][8][/SUP] According to historian David Oshinsky, Salk grew up in the "Jewish immigrant culture" of New York.
Marriage and Death
The day after his graduation from medical school in 1939, Salk married Donna Lindsay, a master's candidate at the New York College of Social Work. David Oshinsky writes that her father, Elmer Lindsay, "a wealthy Manhattan dentist, viewed Salk as a social inferior, several cuts below Donna's former suitors." Eventually, her father agreed to the marriage on two conditions: first, Salk must wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his "rather pedestrian status" by giving himself a middle name."[SUP][14][/SUP]
They had three children: Peter, Darrell, and Jonathan Salk. In 1968, they divorced, and in 1970, Salk married Franoise Gilot, the former mistress of Pablo Picasso.
Jonas Salk died from heart failure at the age of 80 on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla,[SUP][74][/SUP] and was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.[SUP][75]
Polio a Plague : Pre Vaccine Era
[/SUP]Until 1957, when the Salk vaccine was introduced, polio was considered one of the most frightening public health problems in the world. In the postwar United States, annual epidemics were increasingly devastating. The 1952 U.S. epidemic was the worst outbreak in the nation's history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis,[SUP][1][/SUP] with most of its victims being children. The "public reaction was to a plague", said historian Bill O'Neal.[SUP][2][/SUP]"Citizens of urban areas were to be terrified every summer when this frightful visitor returned." According to a 2009 PBS documentary, "Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio."
Many famous people were polio victims; most were able to overcome their disabilities, while others were less fortunate. Itzhak Perlman, one of the world's finest violinists, was permanently disabled at age four, and still plays sitting down. Actor Donald Sutherland, President Roosevelt, writer Arthur C. Clarke, writer Robert Anton Wilson, actress Mia Farrow,[SUP][21][/SUP] singer-musician Neil Young, Olympic dressage rider Lis Hartel, actor Alan Alda, musician David Sanborn, singer Dinah Shore, singer Joni Mitchell, former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, director Francis Ford Coppola, nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, actor Lionel Barrymore,[SUP][22][/SUP] and Congressman James H. Scheuer were infected.[SUP][23]
World Wide Eradication Successes and Failures
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By the end of 1990, an estimated 500,000 annual cases worldwide of paralysis resulting from polio had been prevented due to immunization programs carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, and many other organizations, and in 1991, transmission of polio was declared as "interrupted" in the Western Hemisphere.
In developing countries, estimates in 1988 ran as high as 350,000 cases each year.[SUP][40][/SUP] As a result, in 2002, more than 500 million children were immunized in 93 countries,[SUP][20][/SUP][SUP]:112[/SUP]and by December 2002, there were only 1,924 cases worldwide, mostly in India,[SUP][41][/SUP] with six other countries where polio was still endemic: Afghanistan, Egypt, Niger, Nigeria,Pakistan, and Somalia.[SUP][42][/SUP]
By early 2014, however, the WHO listed only three remaining countries where polio was still endemic, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, and declared Pakistan's city of Peshawar as the world's "largest reservoir" of polio.[SUP][43][/SUP] Pakistan's high numbers are attributed partly to the fact that religious extremists have preached the conspiracy theory that the vaccine is actually a western conspiracy to sterilize the population. As a result, many have gone unvaccinated, with 65 vaccine workers having been killed by extremists since December 2012 and cases increasing 400% during 2014 alone.[SUP][44][/SUP]
China
In 1993, China initiated a national immunization program, with over 80 million children getting vaccinated in just two days; by the following year, the country reported only five cases of polio.[SUP][45][/SUP]
India
In 1981, India reported over 38,000 cases of polio. By 1999, intensive vaccination campaigns had succeeded in eradicating the type 2 strain of virus from India. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates sponsored a campaign to eradicate polio, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed nearly $1 billion to health and development projects throughout India.[SUP][46][/SUP] The last case of polio in India, in two-year-old Rukhsaar Khatoon, was confirmed on January 13, 2011. India was removed from the list of polio-endemic countries in 2012, and marked two years without a case of polio on January 13, 2013.[SUP][47][/SUP] As no new cases were found by January 2014, the nation was officially declared polio-free.[SUP][41][/SUP]
Africa
In 2003, after an outbreak in Nigeria, international organizations spent $10 million to vaccinate 15 million children in Nigeria and neighboring countries.[SUP][20][/SUP][SUP]:112[/SUP]
Latin America
During the 1970s, Latin America had an estimated 15,000 paralysis cases, with about 1,750 deaths each year from polio. By 1991, the last case of polio was reported in Latin America and the Caribbean, and polio has now been declared as fully eliminated from the region.[SUP][48][/SUP]
Remaining eradication efforts, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan
In 1988, numerous international medical organizations launched a campaign to eradicate polio globally, as had been successfully done for smallpox. By 2003, polio had been eradicated in all but a few countries, among them Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan[SUP][49][/SUP]
However, mullahs in northern Nigeria began to oppose the vaccination program, claiming that it was a plot to spread AIDS and sterility, and prevented any vaccination. Polio cases in Nigeria tripled over the next three years.[SUP][49][/SUP]
Environmental scientist Lester Brown speculates that Nigerian Muslims may have spread the disease to Muslims of other polio-free countries during their annual pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. With these same fears, Saudi Arabian officials imposed polio vaccination requirement on certain visitors.
In Pakistan in 2007, opposition was violent to vaccinations in the Northwest Frontier Province, where a doctor and a health worker in the polio eradication program were killed. Since then, the Taliban has blocked all vaccinations in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. As a result, Pakistan was the only country in 2010 to record an increase in cases of polio, according to the WHO, along with having the highest incidence of polio in the world.[SUP][50][/SUP] Meanwhile, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent $1.5 billion, plans to spend another $1.8 billion through 2018 to help eradicate the virus.[SUP][51]
A Wonderful Quote of Sir Jonas Salk
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He said,"If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth,within 50 years all life on Earth would end.If all human beings disappeared from the Earth,within 50 years all forms of life would flourish."
[SUP]
Thank u Sir Jonas Salk for giving us such a precious and cheapest gift , If u had patent it you could have become the richest person on this world.
Humanity will always remain indebted by your generosity!
sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk#Early_days
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript?language=en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erHXKP386Nk
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