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By the end of the 1950s Hungary became an unlikely leader in what we now call global health. Only three years after Soviet tanks crushed the revolution of 1956, Hungary became one of the first countries to introduce the Sabin vaccine into its national vaccination programme. This immunisation campaign was built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West, in which scientists, specimens, vaccines and iron lungs crossed over the Iron Curtain. Dóra Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. She argues that despite the antagonistic international atmosphere of the 1950s, spaces of transnational cooperation between blocs emerged to tackle a common health crisis. At the same time, she shows that epidemic concepts and policies were influenced by the very Cold War rhetoric that medical and political cooperation transcended. Also available as Open Access.
By the end of the 1950s Hungary became an unlikely leader in what we now call global health. Only three years after Soviet tanks crushed the revolution of 1956, Hungary became one of the first countries to introduce the Sabin vaccine into its national vaccination programme. This immunisation campaign was built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West, in which scientists, specimens, vaccines and iron lungs crossed over the Iron Curtain. Dóra Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. She argues that despite the antagonistic international atmosphere of the 1950s, spaces of transnational cooperation between blocs emerged to tackle a common health crisis. At the same time, she shows that epidemic concepts and policies were influenced by the very Cold War rhetoric that medical and political cooperation transcended. Also available as Open Access.
26 This was partially the result of the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, when the boundaries of Hungary were redrawn, reducing the country's size by two-thirds. Other large cities and administrative centers now fell outside the border, leaving Budapest to account for about a tenth of the population.
The year 1952 was a tumultuous one. It saw the Cold War gain full speed: the United States detonated its first hydrogen bomb, while Britain announced that it was now in the possession of an atomic bomb. East Germany started forming the National People's Army and the B-52 aircraft flew for the first time. As the division of the world between East and West deepened, another crisis was unfolding as the summer of 1952 arrived: a severe polio epidemic wave swept over the world, leaving tens of thousands of children disabled and thousands dead. The worst epidemic outbreak in the history of the United States and Denmark, polio in 1952 marked a turning point in the history of the disease. The severe epidemic boosted vaccine research in the former country, and prompted innovation in respiratory technology in the latter, making it the European centre of polio research.The epidemic wave also hit Hungary, a small Eastern European country whose society was still struggling with the aftermath of a destructive war and whose communist government was grappling with the task of laying down the foundations of a new era. The epidemic started with an outbreak in North-Eastern Hungary, 1 a region that continued to show the highest incident rates of polio throughout the decade. Cases of poliomyelitis started rising in June and peaked in August and September, paralysing nearly 500 patients and leaving 29 dead 2 out of a total population of roughly 9.5 million. 3 This was the first major epidemic since 1948. At first glance, the numbers do not seem to be particularly high, especially compared to the over 21,000 paralytic cases in the United States 4
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