Word: bcg
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Public Health Service's unspectacular mass X rays of the population (for early T.B. detection) have done most to take the T.B. death rate for a fall. This year a large-scale BCG (for bacillus of Calmette and Guerin, named for its discoverers) vaccination project (TIME, Nov. 11) may take it still further. The plan, to vaccinate 100,000 U.S. schoolchildren against tuberculosis, has already been begun in Columbus, Ga., will soon move on to T.B. areas in large cities (including San Francisco's Chinatown). U.S. specialists, who have long viewed BCG with suspicion in spite...
What can be done? UNRRA, the American Red Cross, Europe's handful of doctors have failed to stop the white plague's spread. This month one of Europe's smallest countries, Denmark, will launch a brave try. Its weapon: BCG vaccine (TIME, Nov. 11), which in Danish tests has reduced the T.B. rate to one-seventh that among the unvaccinated. In the next few weeks Danish Red Cross teams, each consisting of a doctor, two nurses and a secretary, will go to Warsaw, Budapest and Rendsburg, Germany, to begin vaccinating their populations, children first...
Despite its wide use abroad (in Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada, South America), U.S. authorities have been leary of BCG because 1) they feared that the original mild infection might in time become severe, 2) an experiment with poorly prepared BCG once caused a disastrous T.B. outbreak in Lübeck, Germany...
They yielded, finally, to the persuasive arguments of one of the world's great T.B. experts: Denmark's Dr. Johannes Holm. Dr. Holm is so convinced of BCG's worth that during the war he took the risk of smuggling the vaccine to Danish prisoners in German concentration camps...
...months ago, at an unpublicized conference of top U.S. specialists in Washington, Dr. Holm produced his carefully documented evidence: he and his co-workers had immunized 250,000 Danes, cut their T.B. deathrate to one-seventh that of the unvaccinated. BCG, he said, "is absolutely safe." The clincher: a U.S. test of 3,000 Indians which produced the same impressive results (TIME, June...