ABOUT BOOK

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.