Community-Wide Use of Oral Poliovirus Vaccine

The extensive field trials of 1959 on very large numbers of susceptible persons of various ages that were carried out in many countries outside of the United States not only established the safety and effectiveness of an oral live poliovirus vaccine, but also suggested the possibility that the disease as well as the causative paralytic viruses could, under certain conditions, be completely eliminated.1-8The purpose of the present communication is to report the results of studies carried out in connection with the first community-wide use in a large American city of the attenuated, oral poliovirus vaccine, developed by one of us and previously employed in the extensive field trials mentioned above. The community-wide program in Cincinnati was initiated in April, 1960, by the Board of Health in an attempt to determine whether the voluntary public acceptance of the new oral polio vaccine would be sufficiently great to eliminate poliomyelitis