Lola Butcher at Undark:
In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the organization now called March of Dimes, with the goal of wiping out polio, the viral disease that caused his paraplegia. Just 17 years later, clear evidence arrived that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was effective — the first step in the near-total eradication of polio around the world. In the organization’s 1955 annual report, its top executive called the vaccine a “planned miracle.”
In “Planning Miracles: How to Prevent Future Pandemics,” science journalist Jon Cohen introduces readers to biologists, veterinarians, epidemiologists, and others who are trying for another miracle: to blunt pandemics, or even prevent them altogether.
Cohen, a longtime correspondent for Science magazine, traveled the globe to document the vast amount of work being done to identify emerging threats, along with the vaccines and other containment practices to stop their spread. The sheer volume of effort is a reason for hope. But polio had one highly visible attribute — a world leader partially paralyzed by the disease — that our viral diseases today do not have.
More here.
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