The Hardin Tribune Herald

Make the Most of Your Luck
We Americans are a lucky people, so lucky that we take our miracles for granted. We have grown used to the fact that we can bridge time and distance with the twist of the dial, that we can push buttons to control light and darkness, heat and cold. We no longer marvel that we can swallow a few pills, and take a few simple injections, and thus banish much of the pain and sickness that has been mankind's lot since the world began.

It's a dangerous attitude, this complacency of ours, if it leads us to neglect the great benefits with which modern science has enriched our lives. Right now millions of Americans are facing just that danger because they have failed to use the latest medical miracle, the Salk Polio Vaccine.

The season of greatest polio danger is upon us and many needless victims have already paid the price of neglect. But many more such tragedies can be prevented if everyone, men, women and children, will avail themselves of this cheap and easy insurance against the crippling disaster. Millions of dollars and seventeen long, hard years of painstaking research went into this discovery. More than 300,000 people were cruelly stricken while scientists sought the weapon which provides protection against paralytic polio. Now the weapon is known, the vaccine is available to all. It will be ironic and tragic if thousands more are stricken while the vaccine lies idle in the physicians' refrigerators.