Dr. Jonas Stalk is credited for his discovery of a vaccine which cured Polio. Polio, also known as Poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis is an acute viral disease which caused disability among millions of people worldwide.
Before 1955, controlling numbers of Polio cases was one of the most challenging task before researchers and Polio was most infamous threat to children. This situation started changing after Jonas Salk – who was an American physician and medical researcher – developed the first safe and effective vaccine for polio known to world as The Salk vaccine, or inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV).
Jonas Stalk was born October 28, 1914, (it’s 100th birthday today) in New York City. In 1942 at the University of Michigan School of Public Health he became part of a group that was working to develop a vaccine against the flu. In 1947 he became head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. At Pittsburgh he began research on polio. On April 12, 1955, the vaccine was released for use in the United States. He established the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 1963. Salk died in 1995.