Word: bcg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Recently back from a world tour (at his own expense), during which he saw that tuberculosis is still riding high and fast in almost every country, Dr. O'Brien is convinced that the only hope of wiping out the disease lies in mass vaccination with the vaccine called BCG (for bacillus of Calmette and Guérin, the French scientists who developed it from 1908 to 1924). But health officials in the U.S., O'Brien charges, have neglected using BCG "through ignorance of its efficiency and misunderstandings* regarding its harmlessness...
...BCG is of no help to people who already have tuberculosis. But many bacteriologists and doctors believe that if every infant in the world were to be vaccinated with BCG, the disease would be wiped out completely within a few generations...
Said Dr. O'Brien: "Let us have the honesty to accept the futility of our present methods alone, and the courage to embark immediately on a program of extensive BCG vaccinations, without which tuberculosis will present the same problems a thousand years from now as it does today. Unless we use vaccination as in smallpox and diphtheria, there is, in my opinion, no hope...
...over Europe, WHO teams were carrying out the largest immunization program in history in an effort to cut down the ravages of tuberculosis. So far, almost 10 million children have been given BCG vaccine. The campaign has begun in Africa, the Near East and the Orient; eventually, 40 to 50 million children will be inoculated...