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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 4, 1993                   TAG: 9303040024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

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ALBERT SABIN DIES AT 86

Health pioneer Albert Sabin, the immigrant whose oral vaccine helped to all but eliminate the scourge of crippling polio in the industrialized world, died Wednesday. He was 86.

He died at Georgetown University Medical Center of congestive heart failure, his daughter said.

"His accomplishments in the area of poliomyelitis are monumental because the vaccine that he developed was one that could be given so easily to so many people," said Dr. William K. Schubert, president of Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, where Sabin worked for 30 years.

The Sabin live-virus vaccine went into widespread use in the United States in 1962 after mass trials in 1958-59 in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Mexico and Singapore.

Because it was dispensed on a sugar cube, it rapidly replaced an injected killed-virus vaccine developed seven years earlier by Jonas Salk. Not only was it easier to take and administer, it provided longer protection.

From 1962 to 1964, as many as 100 million Americans swallowed the cube, many on "Sabin Sundays" organized by doctors and health departments.

President Clinton and the medical world remembered Sabin with admiration.

Clinton called Sabin "one of the great heroes of American medicine."

Salk called Sabin's death "a great loss. . . . His contributions toward the control of polio will endure long in the future."

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