Word: bcg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...overcrowding, malnutrition and ignorance, its prevention is largely a sociological problem. Doctors, however, have long searched in vain for a medical weapon that would work against TB with the sure efficacy of, say, the smallpox vaccine against smallpox. The best they have found so far is the vaccine called BCG, which was first tried out on calves in 1908 at France's Pasteur Institute...
...BCG is far from being the perfect weapon. Some doctors think that it can be downright dangerous; even its most ardent partisans admit that it will not do a complete immunization job in every case. It can be used only on patients showing no active sign of the disease. An added difficulty is the fact that no one can be certain just how effective BCG is until it is made the only preventive agent in a long-term experiment on a large mass of people...
Divided Credit. In Denmark, where BCG has been widely used, the tuberculosis death rate has been reduced over the last two decades from 71 to 19 per 100,000 inhabitants. But socially conscious Denmark has gone further than most nations in eliminating the factors that encourage tuberculosis. In lands where all else is hopeless, BCG has been given a fairer chance to make a statistical case for itself. Throughout the crowded, war-torn areas of Europe and the East, where general health conditions are at their worst, the International Tuberculosis Campaign, jointly sponsored by several U.N. and Red Cross organizations...
...major jobs done thus far by BCG has been in occupied Japan, where some 31 million BCG vaccinations have been given since V-J day. In the vaccinated group, mortality has been cut by 88%. Three laboratories in the U.S. manufacture BCG, but so far the U.S. Public Health Service has not licensed them to distribute the culture for mass vaccinations. Dr. William G. Workman, chief of biologics control of the P.H.S., said in Washington last week that he did not know exactly when P.H.S. approval would be given...
...vaccine's reputation suffered a serious setback in Lübeck, Germany, in 1930, when 72 of 251 infants died after being vaccinated with what was thought to be BCG. Investigation proved that the children had been vaccinated with another culture, but the outcry was so great throughout the world that BCG was regarded with suspicion for years...