Word: bcg
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...BCG vaccine is made from weakened tubercle bacilli. It immunizes by building up a person's resistance through a mild infection...
...doctors had hesitated for 25 years to make the plunge, but last week they finally did. The U.S. Public Health Service announced that it had decided to make a big-scale test of BCG,* the anti-tuberculosis vaccine. Somewhere in the South, in a community with a high T.B. deathrate, PHS will soon have under way the first U.S. experiment in community-wide immunization against T.B. by vaccinating 100,000 people...
...Robert Koch first isolated the germ itself in 1882" is, to say the least, a gross exaggeration. There have been many great achievements in the field of tuberculosis since the time of Koch. Thus, the therapeutic possibilities of sulfones and streptomycin, as well as the studies of immunization with BCG, are discussed in the very same issue of your magazine; you could also have mentioned, among other lines of progress, the improvement of X-ray methods of diagnosis, the campaign for the detection of early cases, the growth of sanatoria, the different procedures of collapse therapy...
Heretofore the only effective preventive against tuberculosis has been a vaccine invented by a French bacteriologist, Albert Calmette and a French veterinarian, Charles Guerin, This BCG vaccine has never been quite safe because it is composed of living attenuated tubercle bacilli, which sometimes are potent enough to cause fulminating tuberculosis...
Last week Drs. Eugene Lindsay Opie and Jules Freund of Cornell University Medical College reported in the Journal of Experimental Medicine a harmless preventive which they described as just as effective as BCG. They simply killed tubercle bacilli by heat and added heated horse serum. This protects an inoculated individual for one or two years, long enough, noted the doctors, "to influence favorably the delicate balance between asymptomatic or latent infection and progressive manifest disease that is characteristic of human tuberculosis...