The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis PDF

Rating: (20 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Paul A. Offit Page ISBN : 9780300108644 New from $13.95 Format: PDF

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From Publishers Weekly

After a wave of books celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, Offit's troubling account is the first to focus on a largely forgotten aspect—one with negative repercussions 50 years later. In a nuanced examination of a complex story, Offit, a professor of pediatrics and expert in infectious diseases, relates how Cutter Laboratories, one of several pharmaceutical companies licensed to produce Salk's killed-virus vaccine, shipped many lots of vaccine containing live virus, creating a mini polio epidemic: 40,000 children became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, 10 died. Offit carefully examines how Cutter was and was not responsible: tests for detecting live virus at the time were simply not sensitive enough, but Cutter departed from Salk's safe production protocols. And while the company knew there was a problem, it failed to notify the government's oversight agency. Cutter faced costly lawsuits that have resulted, according to Offit, in today's vaccine crisis: shortages (think of last year's flu vaccine) due to pharmaceutical companies' unwillingness to risk testing and producing vaccines and face possible litigation. In another example of the law of unintended consequences, Offit shows how "the Cutter Incident" led Salk's vaccine to be replaced by a less safe one: Sabin's live-virus vaccine. (Oct.)
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From Booklist

Pointing to recent shortages of flu and several childhood-disease vaccines as well as the dearth of new vaccines, Offit says that pharmaceutical companies are staying away from vaccine research and production in droves. He lays responsibility for this lamentable situation on the outcome of a court battle now 50 years old and the subsequent snowballing of legal and legislative reactions. Beginning with a tragic 1955 error at Cutter Laboratories--one of the first companies producing the Salk polio vaccine--that caused polio in thousands, Offit maps the way the courts have handled pharmaceutical liability, the way juries have awarded damages, the federal Vaccines for Children Program and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and other influences on vaccine development. Those trends and agencies have so inflated the costs and risks relative to probable profits that vaccine production has been discouraged. Offit concludes that, because the U.S. has made risks high and profits negligible, many more children will suffer illnesses that can be prevented. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (October 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300108648
• ISBN-13: 978-0300108644
• Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 6.3 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds

The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis PDF

There's a lot of noise about vaccines today, what with bird flu and who knows what over the horizon, but nothing compared with 50 years ago, when the Salk polio vaccine was introduced.

People younger than about 60 years old can hardly imagine the fear that gripped American parents every summer then. The shadow of the iron lung was far more terrifying than the shadow of the atomic bomb.

Salk vaccine worked and, under proper controls, was safe.

But controls were not proper, and vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories killed 10 people and paralyzed a few hundred more. At least several hundred thousand Americans were exposed to live polio virus. More did not become severely ill because fewer than one percent of people exposed to wild virus show symptoms.

Physician Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician in Philadelphia, says the "Cutter Incident" was more than just a forgotten medical mishap.

The net Offit casts brings back an amazing variety of things: research on aborted fetuses, Eddie Cantor and Nancy Reagan, Nobel Prizes and presidential politics, irresponsible journalists, backstabbing researchers.

Offit, a skilled expository writer, packs a lot of information into the first 130 pages to set up his current concern: That the fallout from Cutter Laboratories' bad vaccine led to legal precedents that continue to endanger lives today.

In other words, Offit has reached back half a century to find a hook on which to hang a plea for tort "reform."

Tort reform is a swamp with only a narrow causeway through it.

On the left hand lie the plaintiffs' lawyers, greedy, sensationalist and underhanded, as exemplified by the Milli Vanilli raid.