(Jan 11, 2008) When I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, my parents warned me every summer to stay away from public pools or taking any chances running under opened fire hydrants to cools us from the brick-and- tar baking heat. Their fear was the epidemic of polio that haunted the US -- 52,000 cases in 1952 alone. My parents worried that polio "germs" could be carried in the highly used and abused public waters.

Yet in April 1955, in my 17th year, lo and behold Dr. Jonas Salk, a
funny looking guy from Pittsburgh, announced from the University of
Michigan that he had developed a polio vaccine for distribution.
Eureka. Thousands of families like mine flooded to the local
doctors, clinics, and hospitals. It seemed all those rosaries my
friends' mothers and mine gave up to the Holy Mother paid off. But
did they?

As William Carlsen reports in his SFGATE article "Rogue virus in the
vaccine:" Salk's vaccine was produced by actually growing live polio
virus on kidney tissue from the Asian rhesus monkey.