Oral Polio Vaccine

Photo grabbed from Sabin.org

More than 20 years ago, polio was a serious threat to children's health. Newly delivered mothers would always ask the doctor to check if their children had complete extremities and if they were healthy.

Dr. Juan Flavier, called a doctor to the barrio, when he became Secretary of Health, launched a campaign to eradicate polio. Named Oplan Alis Disease, it was a massive immunization campaign which later resulted in the World Health Organization declaring Philippines as Polio-free.

When I joined the Jaycees back in 1991, my first project was Oplan Polio. That project involved information campaign and giving of vaccines to children in the remote areas of Iligan City. It was one fulfilling project, which defined my involvement with the organization. 

Incidentally, today is the birth date of Albert Sabin, the developer of the oral polio vaccine. 

Albert was born in Bialystok, Poland (1906), to Jewish parents; his last name was Saperstein. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1921; he changed his name to Sabin when he became a naturalized citizen in 1930. He began his research on poliomyelitis while he was still a medical student at New York University. Later, at the University of Cincinnati, he proved that the poliovirus entered the body not through the respiratory tract, as was commonly believed, but through the digestive tract. This breakthrough started him on a new line of thought: if a weakened form of the poliomyelitis virus was given orally, it might be more effective than its dead counterpart, which was given via injection. The Sabin oral polio vaccine was approved for use in the United States in 1960, and soon became the vaccine of choice around the world. {Source}