What was the cutter incident

They shared the same goal, of course: to get the Swedish population vaccinated before another big epidemic struck the country. Still the ideas of what constituted a safe vaccine varied in the media, the public and medical experts. I believe that both perspectives are understandable. Even after the Cutter incident, it was obvious to all that for instance Denmark and Canada did not cancel their campaigns and continued to use a vaccine based on Salk's method, without any problem.

The Swedish people continued contracting polio during and , so from a public point of view it was reasonable to question why Sweden did not want to import vaccine during those years.

From the Swedish researchers' perspective it was, of course, a more complex matter. One of the complicating factors may have been the many strong personalities in the international polio vaccine research of the s. Sweden's leading polio researcher, Sven Gard, openly critiqued Jonas Salk and his choice of methods and materials for his vaccine. This critique was also evident in Gard's work within the Nobel Committee.

Prusiner recently published an exciting description of the work within this exclusive scientific milieu that they both know very well. Norrby and Prusiner shed light on a question asked many times; why was Salk never selected as Nobel laureate? Jonas Salk was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine more than once, the first time in Every nominee has an evaluator and as a prominent member of the Nobel committee, Sven Gard evaluated Salk's work every time.

Gard underlined that some of Salk's working hypotheses in fact were incorrect and that it could not be excluded that the Cutter incident was a "result directly from his practical application of such incorrect hypotheses" Needless to say, Gard's extended evaluation in made further Salk nominations fruitless.

Then again, as Ulrike Lindner showed, the Cutter incident came to create an international discussion of vaccine safety standards. Studying Britain and West Germany, Lindner concluded that national scientific cultures, along with how health officials and governments perceive other countries' safety standards, influenced the implementation of IPV Adding to that argument, Alison Day also highlighted how New Zealand medical authorities, after the Cutter incident, regarded all American produced IPV as below standard and unsafe.

New Zealand however did believe that the IPV was useful and came to import Australian and British produced vaccine for their polio immunization programme But they were not confident that the campaign would be without problems. The fear of repeating the Cutter incident on Swedish soil was apparent. This was also evident in the words of Olin's successor at SBL, Holger Lundback, who wrote that it required a lot of courage to give the green light to a Swedish IPV campaign in With those words Lundback echoed all of his predecessors at the SBL and previous Swedish polio researchers.

The scientific culture shaped by Medin, Wickman, Kling, Gard and Olin had always advocated a cautious approach. Paul, John. The history of poliomyelitis.

Lassen, Henry C. The epidemic of poliomyelitis in Copenhagen, Proceeding of the Royal Society o Medoicine. De svenska polioepidemiernas historia. Stockholm: Carlssons; , p. Author's translation. Gard, Sven. Den hygieniska profylaxen. Nordisk Medicin. Oshinsky, David M.

An American story. New York: Oxford University Press; , p. Paul, n. Polio vaccination in Sweden. Review of Infectious Diseases. Aylward, Bruce; Yamada, Tadataka. The polio endgame. The New England Journal of Medicine. For international studies of the history of polio epidemics focusing on medical science and society, see, for example, Paul, n. Gould, Tony. A summer plague, Polio and its survivors. Dirt and disease. Polio before FDR.

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; Poliomyelitis and the neurologists: the view from England Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Scientific specialization and the poliovirus controversy in the years before World War II. The middle-class plague: epidemic polio and Canadian State, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. Speculation and experimentation in early poliomyelitis research. Clio Medica. International medical cooperation: Dr. Albert Sabin, live poliovirus vaccine and the Soviets.

Patenting the sun. Polio and the Salk vaccine. New York: Anchor Books; In: Kiple, Kenneth F. The Cambridge world history of human disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; , p. Polio and its aftermath. The paralysis of culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Poliomyelitis: a world geography: emergence to eradication. Oxford: Oxford University Press; From emergence to eradication: the epidemiology of poliomyelitis deconstructed. American Journal of Epidemiology.

Oshinsky, n. Offit, Paul A. The Cutter incident. How America's first polio vaccine led to the growing vaccine crisis. Day, Alison. The Cutter incident and its implications for the Salk polio vaccine in New Zealand Health and History.

Lindner, Ulrike. Changing regulations and risk assessments: national responses to the introduction of inactivated polio vaccine in the UK and West Germany. In: Gradmann, Christoph; Simon, Jonathan, eds.

Evaluating and standardizing therapeutic agents, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan; , p. The vaccine was recalled as soon as cases of polio were detected. The Cutter Incident was a defining moment in the history of vaccine manufacturing and government oversight of vaccines, and led to the creation of a better system of regulating vaccines.

After the government improved this process and increased oversight, polio vaccinations resumed in the fall of At the time, there was no system in place to compensate people who might have been harmed by a vaccine. Today we have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program external icon VICP , which uses scientific evidence to determine whether a vaccine might be the cause of an illness or injury, and provides compensation to individuals found to have been harmed by a vaccine.

The VICP remains a model method for ensuring that all persons harmed by vaccines are compensated quickly and fairly, while also protecting companies that make lifesaving products from financially unsustainable liability claims through the tort system.

The virus came from monkey kidney cell cultures used to make polio vaccines at that time. After the contamination was discovered, the U. Because of research done with SV40 in animal models, there has been some concern that the virus could cause cancer in humans. However, most studies looking at the relationship between SV40 and cancers are reassuring, finding no causal association between receipt of SVcontaminated polio vaccine and development of cancer.

Adventitious agents in viral vaccines: Lessons learned from 4 case studies. No association between simian virus 40 and diffuse malignant mesothelioma of the pleura in Iranian patients: a molecular and epidemiologic case-control study of 60 patients.

Am J Ind Med. No detection of simian virus 40 in malignant mesothelioma in Korea. Korean J Pathol. Simian virus 40 transformation, malignant mesothelioma and brain tumors. Expert Rev Respir Med. No implication of Simian virus 40 in pathogenesis of malignant pleural mesothelioma in Slovenia. Anticancer Res. Is there a role for SV40 in human cancer?

J Clin Oncol. Is there an association between SV40 contaminated polio vaccine and lymphoproliferative disorders? An age-period-cohort analysis on Norwegian data from to How to publish with Brill.

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Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. This article revisits the Cutter Incident in the United States in April when mass-produced doses of polio vaccine containing insufficiently inactivated killed live polio virus were released to the U. The Cutter Incident also affected subsequent vaccine development and these lessons remain relevant in the international quest to create a rapidly developed vaccine for COVID The Cutter Incident shows how things can go wrong when a vaccine is manufactured in haste and without adequate safety precautions during mass-production.

The federal government inspects meat in the slaughterhouses more carefully than it has examined the polio vaccine. The vaccine was packed and ready for delivery. After many months of feverish development to find a cure, hundreds of boxes, each containing thousands of tiny glass bottles filled with a desperately-sought solution, waited for shipment across the country. Bernice Eddy. Eddy began inoculating monkeys with samples from five lots of vaccines and when one animal demonstrated signs of paralysis, this indicated that vaccines in the mass-produced inventory had not been properly inactivated.

After reporting this problem to the National Institute of Health, Eddy received no response. The damage was already done and was seeping through all too many children, mostly 1st and 2nd graders who were prioritized because of their risk to natural polio infection. By April 30, according to Paul A. Offit, M. According to Robert Gallo, M. By the time the error was discovered, three-quarters of the victims had been paralyzed and eleven had died.

The U. This article focuses on the Cutter Incident and it describes how problems in the past may illuminate contemporary and future challenges in either immunizing against or treating COVID At a time when a vaccine is anticipated by billions of individuals, we may better prepare for unanticipated and anticipated problems that lay ahead by looking at past problems. The past does not invariably offer comfort, yet it may help readers realistically appraise current efforts to mitigate current and future pandemics.

Recent examples may help. In terms of the AIDS epidemic, as an example in recent history, lack of coordinated research to find a causal agent, let alone effective treatments, initially led to failure. According to Robert Gallo M. Sources used, and other relevant literature consulted for this paper, merits brief discussion. This paper is organized into three sections. The first section recounts the Cutter Incident in Permissions Icon Permissions. Article PDF first page preview.

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