Medicine: Live-Virus Vaccine

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How soon can a live-virus poliomyelitis vaccine, taken by mouth, supplement or replace the Salk-type, killed-virus vaccine, which must be injected? Not until many tricky questions about safety and effectiveness have been answered, the U.S. Public Health Service has ruled. Last week the National Foundation, which supported Dr. Jonas E. Salk's work with marching dimes, announced grants totaling $300,000 to speed answers to key questions about the live-virus vaccine prepared (also with help from foundation funds) by Cincinnati's Dr. Albert Sabin. Recipients :

¶ Yale University ($81,308), for Dr. John R. Paul to study the extent to which attenuated (weakened) strains of virus, used in the vaccine, may revert to viru lent types during multiplication in the subject's digestive tract. Specifically, what is the best dosage to give protection, and do bigger doses carry greater risk of in creasing virulence?

¶ Baylor University ($170,884), for Dr. Joseph L. Melnick (formerly on Dr. Paul's Yale staff) to run a community trial in Houston with 4.400 volunteers, 250 of them to receive the vaccine. Here, too, signs of reversion to virulence will be sought; also, evidence of how much protection accrues to contacts who "catch" the live virus from vaccinated subjects without being vaccinated themselves.

¶ Western Reserve University ($57,387), in Cleveland, for Dr. Frederick C. Robbins to find out how the vaccine will work if fed to newborn infants. Question is whether polio antibodies, inherited from the mother and conferring "passive immunity" for a few months, will interfere with the child's developing its own antibodies for lasting "active immunity."

Not covered by the National Foundation grants are two other U.S. -made oral vaccines. One, prepared by Dr. Herald R. Cox for Lederle Laboratories, is being tested by the University of Minnesota. The other, from Dr. Hilary Koprowski of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute, is also being tried at a number of institutions. Both, like the Sabin vaccine, have been given to millions of people outside the U.S. (TIME, Nov. 2).