Medicine: Tuberculosis Vaccine

The National Tuberculosis Association started selling its Christmas Seals Thanksgiving Day. By New Year’s Day the Association through its state and community sub-organizations expects to raise $5,500,000. One-twentieth of the amount ($275,000) will go to the National Association for its general work. The balance remains in the contributing communities for any necessary local work on the prevention and cure of tuberculosis.

To stimulate Seals sale and to report to the medical profession, Dr. William Hallock Park, director of the New York City department of health’s bureau of laboratories, last week announced: “There is good reason to believe that the Calmette-Guérin vaccine has been effective in giving protection against tuberculosis.”

The late great German, Robert Koch (1843-1910), who with the late great Louis Pasteur (1822-95) gave medicine its modern turn and who lived long enough to win a Nobel Prize (1905),* discovered the tuberculosis bacillus. It is often called Koch’s bacillus. One of Koch’s and Pasteur’s early disciples in the new medicine was young Léon Charles Albert Calmette (born 1863, at Nice). He began to practice medicine in Paris as their discoveries and technique were beginning to spread. He was then 23 and amenable to military service, like every young Frenchman after the Franco-German war (1870-71). He went into the French navy, as a doctor. Then he was posted with French Colonial troops in Indo-China, where he founded the Pasteur Institute of Saïgon. Later he was to found an anti-tuberculosis dispensary at Lille, in honor of Pierre Paul Émile Roux, present director of the Pasteur Institute of Paris (in which Dr. Calmette is the senior professor of microbiology and assistant director) and to become director of the Pasteur Institute at Lille.

Continuing the researches of his great preceptors, Dr. Calmette with his associate C. Guérin, a veterinary surgeon, discovered that the descendants of the tuberculosis bacillus, bred for many generations in ox bile and glycerine, lost their virulency but could establish immunity in young animals against potent tuberculosis germs. In their experience the vaccine must be fed to an infant who has been exposed to the disease during its first ten days of life. Later it may be given hypodermically. It is powerless to cure, but has undoubtedly prevented tuberculosis.

It was to the Calmette-Guérin vaccine that Manhattan’s Dr. Park referred last week. The U. S. profession has been skeptical of its value, although Drs. Calmette and Guérin have tested it with apparent success on more than 100,000 French infants. Rumanian, German, and English experience have confirmed the discoverers’ assertions and experience. Because of his ascendancy in U. S. bacteriology, Dr. Park’s approbation, although limited, made the Calmette-Guérin vaccine a U. S. therapeutic currency.

*The Swedish Alfred Bernhard Nobel’s posthumous Prize-giving began in 1901. Emil von Behring (1854-1917), German, won the first Prize in Medicine for his discovery that the serum of an immunized person will confer immunity against the same disease on another into whom it is injected (Behring’s Law).