It has been 60 years since a Rockwood man helped develop the first polio vaccine in Britain.
In the late 1950s, polio vaccines to inoculate a million children in the United Kingdom went directly through Alex Kanarek’s hands.
“I regard that three million doses that protected [one] million children from polio as being probably my greatest contribution, if you like, to children’s health,” he said.
Kanarek, now 87, had just graduated with his PhD in virus research from the University of Cambridge when the British government awarded contracts to two companies in the UK to develop a polio vaccine for mass production.
The year was 1954 and Jonas Salk had just developed and began mass production of a polio vaccine in the United States.
The live polio virus used for the vaccine came from Connaught Laboratories in Toronto, Kanarek said, and while that formula was shared with British laboratories, scientists were left on their own to develop the actual vaccine.
“There was a lot of trade secrets in it,” Kanarek said.
He was hired by Burroughs, Wellcome Laboratory and got to work with two other scientists and six laboratory assistants to develop a safe and effective inactivated vaccine.
“We split the job into three parts,” Kanarek said. “Grow the virus, process it to make vaccine and test it.”
He was in charge of processing the vaccine.
“What I had to do was take … (a blood bottle), I had hundreds of these, and I would put 500 ml of virus in a bottle, I would add chemicals, I would warm it up and I would take samples to see how … the virus was being killed and we would test those samples for live virus, residual virus and we would test them when they were all gone for how it would immunize,” he said.
It took three years before the three scientists found a vaccine that would produce the antibodies that would kill the polio virus.
Once the vaccine was developed Kanarek said Burroughs, Wellcome built a new laboratory just for polio vaccine production in 1958.
The government wanted to be able to immunize a million children a year, which meant building a lab that could handle the production of three million doses a year.
“Each kid had to have three shots,” Kanarek said. “Give them a shot, give them a booster, give them another booster.”
Kanarek was involved with designing a 100 litre tank, which was the largest volume he thought was safe to handle.
“In those tanks I processed 138 lots successfully of polio virus,” he said. “(That’s) 13.8 thousand litres or something.
“138 lots were grown and … purified, inactivated and used to make vaccine. Out of that we made three million doses of vaccine.”
Kanarek said there were two elements the scientists needed to be sure of when creating the vaccine.
“One, that we had finally killed the stuff and secondly, that it was still capable of producing immunity in children,” he said.
He said that they had a process that worked for killing polio, so as long as the conditions were consistent the virus would always be killed.
“Then came the critical thing, which was the testing,” he said. “And we had trials in Britain and in Northern Ireland and I suppose the really gratifying part was the results of the trials came back and the kids had antibodies.
“And then the government gave us the license to manufacture.”
By 1961 the injected polio vaccine was already being phased out, Kanarek said, because Albert Sabin had developed an oral vaccine that contained the live virus and worked more efficiently. It was in an easy-to-consume pill.
“He grew wild polio viruses in the laboratory under very, very carefully controlled conditions and selected out strains that did not cause paralysis, but they’re live and they still infect children because the infection is what immunizes them but they don’t develop polio,” Kanarek said.
“And that’s the secret behind the irradiation.”
Now, in 2018, polio is irradiated in most areas.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) the cases of wild poliovirus (WPV) (not the result of a vaccine) globally reached an all-time low in 2017.
“In addition, there has been no international spread of WPV since … November 2017,” according to a statement from the WHO emergency committee.
The countries currently at risk of spreading polio internationally are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syrian Arab Republic.
After developing the polio vaccine Kanarek worked for various companies, teaching about vaccines and developing manufacturing and distribution strategies on an international scale.
In Pakistan Kanarek developed a process for distributing the polio vaccine and also oversaw the design and construction of a measles vaccine laboratory.
He emigrated to Canada to work for Connaught and has since retired to Rockwood.
He is now chair of the Concerned Residents Coalition (CRC) board of directors and is working to prevent the proposed James Dick Construction quarry west of Rockwood at 4th Line and Highway 7.
