https://archive.ph/F2R10
"Dr. Samuel L. Katz, a virologist who was part of the research team at Harvard
Medical School that developed the measles vaccine, an advance more than half a
century ago that has saved countless lives, died on Monday at his home in
Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 95.
His son David confirmed the death.
Dr. Katz later enhanced the reputation of the pediatrics department at the Duke
University School of Medicine as its chairman.
Dr. Katz took up the fight against measles in 1956, when he joined a laboratory
at Children’s Hospital Medical Center (now Boston Children’s Hospital) run by
Dr. John Enders. Two years earlier, Dr. Enders had shared the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine for discovering how to grow the polio virus in cultures,
a breakthrough that was critical to Jonas Salk’s development of a polio
vaccine, which led to widespread successful immunizations.
Dr. Enders’s lab had already isolated the measles virus from a 13-year-old boy
when Dr. Katz arrived there as a research fellow. Measles was a major medical
threat at the time: In the decade before the vaccine was made available in
1963, nearly every child in the United States had measles by age 15, with three
to four million people infected by it every year, leading to an estimated 400
to 500 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
Worldwide, measles killed 2.6 million people a year before the availability of
vaccines, the World Health Organization said."
Via
Future Crunch issue 190:
https://futurecrunch.com/
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
