Postcards from the last major vaccination campaign in Argentina, against polio

Vaccination against polio developed by Jonas Salk in 1955 and that he arrived in Argentina in 1956 It was the last major vaccination campaign in the country until Tuesday, when it began to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Polio, feared at the time, killed, paralyzed and atrophied its victims, who numbered more than four thousand.

As happened throughout 2020, when the development of the Covid-19 vaccine was eagerly awaited, in 1955 the solution was urgent for a virus that at the time was a plague on humanity: polio, viral disease affecting the spinal cord and causes muscle weakness.

The first to test the injectable vaccine that Salk had developed were the researcher himself, his wife and children, and in 1953 he published his findings. The good reception in the scientific media facilitated the completion of a clinical trial, the largest to date, which This involved nearly 2,000,000 people.

When Salk announced the results of his study in 1955, the news was greeted with joy; Finally, American families could ease the burden of the uncertainty created by this virus. He didn’t want to patent his discovery. “Can the sun be patented?”, he says, to instantly become a national hero.

The first polio outbreak has occurred between 1942 and 1943: only in the city of Buenos Aires, there was 2000 cases, and journalists denounced the existence of considerable epidemics in Santiago del Estero, Rosario and Mar del Plata. The lack of dissemination by the State of the gravity of the situation facilitated the spread of the virus, particularly in seaside resorts, with a large influx of children, a breeding ground for the development of the epidemic.

The country, at that time, had around four million children under the age of 9, although the disease mainly affects those who breastfeed, up to 3 years old.

However, the first months of summer 1956 saw the worst polio epidemic in our history. The epidemic has reached 6,496 reported cases. 10% of people infected with symptoms died from paralysis of the respiratory muscles. And it was under the de facto government of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu that the vaccination campaign took place, considered “a conquest of medical science”.

The Aramburu government had started to dismantle the state health infrastructure, which affected the functioning of hospitals and institutes that Peronism, since the creation of the Ministry of Health, had tried to centralize. In this scenario, the epidemic of the disease known until then as Heine-Medin breaks out.

Until the vaccine landed in Argentina, attempts were made to control the poliovirus in ridiculous ways for the present day: the streets, sidewalks and trees were whitewashed; mothers put sachets of camphor in their children’s underwear; health authorities imported pulmonary devices; hospital staff helped patients day and night.

In this fight for survival, the Argentine Association of Anesthesiology played a fundamental role, whose president was Margarita Bantz de Oleaga Alarcón, who had been elected on December 16, 1955.

Oleaga, with the support of colleagues on the board of directors, summoned the associates and worked with them for months, honorably helping the sick severe ventilatory failure that they have been admitted to various hospitals in Buenos Aires, which deserves praise from the community and the media.

In April 1955, the United States informed the world that large-scale manufacturing would take a long time and even Americans impose restrictions on exports, because they did not have enough for internal supply.

The nightmare culminated with the appearance of the vaccine and the purchase of a million doses in the United States, which succeeded in stopping the epidemic which had diminished with the onset of winter. September 1, 1956 the first batch of 470 thousand doses and in October another 500 thousand this made it possible to complete the second vaccination.

PS