Pins matching tag:"Public Health"

At Ann Arbor, Thomas Francis Jr announced the results of the largest medical field trial ever run - 1.8 million children - and pronounced Jonas Salk's polio vaccine safe, effective and potent. Church bells rang across the United States; within two years American cases had fallen by almost 90 per cent.

The World Health Assembly certified that smallpox had been wiped from the earth - the only human disease ever eradicated. The last natural case had been in Somalia in 1977, and the campaign that found it had traced and vaccinated outwards from every case for a decade.

The CDC's weekly report carried five cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia in previously healthy young men in Los Angeles, two of them already dead. It is the first published account of what became AIDS, four years before the virus behind it was agreed on.

A measles outbreak that began in mid-March 2026 has killed 909 people with suspected symptoms and confirmed nearly 20,000 cases, by the Directorate General of Health Services' count as of 10 September. It is still running.