Word: cowpox
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Fifth Column. Good's achievements in immunology rest on a broad foundation of work by other scientists dating back to 1796, when the British Physician Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with fluid from a cowpox pustule in a successful attempt to give him resistance against the more virulent smallpox. Jenner knew nothing about the immune system, but he had recognized that milkmaids who frequently came in contact with cows suffering from cowpox seldom contracted smallpox. Scientists began to suspect that the body had a mechanism for identifying and combatting disease agents only after Louis Pasteur discovered...
Vaccination against smallpox is almost 200 years old, yet it is still far from being an invariably safe procedure. Although production methods have become more sanitary, the vaccine itself has changed little since Edward Jenner scraped it from sores on the hand of a cowpox-infected dairymaid. It causes severe and even fatal reactions in a small but appreciable number of people, with an average of seven deaths reported annually in the U.S. since 1950. Also, it probably leaves a greater number of victims with permanent mental damage from spread of the cowpox virus to the brain...
...Journal of Medicine, says that 68% of the patients had serious complications after being vaccinated for the first time (only 7% after repeat vaccinations). No fewer than 20% of the patients had never been directly vaccinated at all: they were mostly children with eczema who picked up the vaccinia (cowpox) infection accidentally from contact with somebody else's sore arm. In the entire group surveyed there were nine deaths, while three survivors appear to have suffered brain damage and a fourth is paralyzed in both arms and legs. In all likelihood, say the N.C.D.C. investigators, complications are many times...
...that doctors should be far more careful before giving the present vaccine. Children with leukemia, or on steroid drugs that depress the immune reaction, obviously should not be vaccinated. Nor should a child with eczema or a history of recent eczema be vaccinated-certainly not without VIG -because cowpox may cause a fulminating and occasionally fatal exacerbation of eczema. But doctors and nurses often do not take the time to ask the right questions...
...long been concerned by the dangers of wholesale, haphazard vaccinations (TIME, May 20), has been working for 20 years to devise a safer vaccine. To the American Pediatric Society in Atlantic City he reported the success that he and his colleague have achieved. Starting with a standard strain of cowpox virus grown in calves, they repeatedly grew it in a series of fertilized eggs. The vaccine from the virus harvested from the last eggs in the series had about the same potency as the standard calf-lymph material and could be given by the usual multiple-puncture method, or injected...