The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis By Paul A. Offit New Haven:Yale University Press, 2005. 238 pp. ISBN: 0-300-10864-8, $27.50

This entertaining, well-written hook provides valuable insights into three interrelated areas, all built around the story of the Cutter incident, a landmark case that in some ways continues to have implications for product liability and the health of the vaccine industry today. The author, Paul Offit, has an admirable ability to present complicated issues in a way that is easy to understand for both technical and nontechnical audiences, and the book should (and does) have wide appeal.

The first part of the story deals with the actual incident, which involved the failure to completely inactivate the very first lots of inactivated poliovaccine licensed for use in the United States, and the resulting epidemic of iatrogenic paralytic polio. This incident holds many lessons for us today. Offit shows how the ultimate outbreak was really the consequence of multiple factors: an inactivation procedure that was not completely understood...