Despite advice in medical school that it couldn’t be done, an inspired Jonas Salk chose to pursue a goal to eliminate wild Poliomyelitis. The determination to achieve a cure would eventually place him in the annals as a legend in medical science. Additional work with the influenza vaccine, muscular dystrophy and AIDS research will be indelibly inscribed by his son, Dr. Peter Salk, a La Jolla physician, with the global Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation, started three years ago. In America in the 1950s, summertime was a time of fear and anxiety for parents; this was the season when children by the thousands became infected with polio, a crippling disease.  This burden of fear was lifted forever when it was announced that Salk had developed a vaccine. Peter Salk was heartened by a report from India that that nation had not experienced a single case of polio last year. This news came on April 12, the 60th anniversary of the elder Salk’s breakthrough against the paralyzing disease. Peter Salk said work still must be done in such countries like Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The challenge to find ways to get the Salk vaccine to the world’s vast humanity and to rid the world of polio is an effort of BeyondPolio formed by the Legacy Foundation,” he said. “Last year there were 16 countries that had experienced cases of wild polio. Even China experienced a new outbreak.” The vaccine being used in the eradication program was developed in 1988 when 350,000 cases of polio were being reported globally each year. Since then, those numbers have been drastically reduced, down to 650 last year, with the number of countries falling from 125 to 16. Peter Salk said the oral vaccine most often used in such countries contains weakened viruses that can sometimes regain the ability to cause polio.  The vaccine his father helped develop uses killed polio viruses and cannot spread the disease, but it is more expensive and may not be available in parts of the world where polio remains a threat. “Stopping transmission of polio viruses requires maintaining high vaccination rates in parts of the world where health infrastructure is sub par, where conflict impedes access to portions of countries and where rumors have spread fear about the vaccination program,” he said.  “At its peak in the United States, the polio epidemic paralyzed or killed up to 58,000 individuals each year, mostly children, before the introduction in 1955 of the inactivated (injected) vaccine developed by my father and his research team,” he said. “In 1961 an oral vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin.” It is a form of that oral vaccine, he said, that is used now, in which weakened viruses could mutate back to a virulent form.  The foundation will also will focus its attention on 2014 in celebration of Jonas Salk’s birth. Featured will be the extensive collection of his papers, which formed the historical basis for his works.