Anthrax vaccine Devastation Economic incentive Commentary

Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint, Louis Pasteur immunology

Anthrax vaccine

• Toussaint created the first live attenuated vaccine
• for chicken cholera,
• treating its agent, later named
• Pasteurella multocida to honor Pasteur,
• using carbolic acid,
• and in 1880 used the same method for creating
• a vaccine for anthrax.
• Pasteur began with Toussaint’s method,
• experimenting with chicken cholera,
• and used a similar method
• for creating a live attenuated anthrax vaccine,
• treating Bacillus anthracis
• with another antiseptic,
• potassium dichromate.
• *
• Publically, Pasteur claimed
• he treated the bacilli with oxygen;
• however, he used an antiseptic
• like Toussaint. The antiseptic,
• potassium dichromate,
• is an oxidizing agent.
• Some sources say there were problems
• with Toussaint’s vaccine;
• others say that Pasteur was jealous and greedy
• and should have given Toussaint credit.

Devastation

• The fifth plague of Egypt, 1500 BCE,
• affecting horses, cows, sheep, oxen, and camels,
• and the sixth plague, the plague of boils,
• afflicting both man and beast,
• could both have been caused
• by Bacillus anthracis.
• In Homer’s Iliad, written in the eighth century BCE,
• Apollo’s punishment on the Achaeans,
• affecting pack animals, dogs, then soldiers,
• assuming Homer wrote of actual events,
• would have been anthrax.
• As the Huns swept across Eurasia in 80 A.D.,
• forty thousand horses
• and a hundred thousand cattle
• died of anthrax.
• Multiple anthrax pandemics starting in 1613
• known as the “black bane”
• killed sixty thousand cattle in Europe.
• Through the nineteenth century
• anthrax killed hundreds of thousands
• of horses, cows, sheep, goats, and people
• worldwide each year.

Economic incentive

• Or “The story of an oxidizing agent.”
• This unacknowledged helper
• had already saved lives as an antiseptic.
• Little did one suspect
• it would be playing a leading role
• in an unrelated drama.
• The stakes were high.
• The government had tried to influence
• the scientific elite,
• but the relevant scientific facts
• were already known.
• The work remaining was
• more for technical assistants
• and veternarians.
• Was the work of a technical assistant
• stolen by the laboratory director?
• Was our agent’s role as an oxidizer
• deliberately obscured?
• Could a world-reknown scientist
• be working only for money?
• The gambit paid off.
• Plausible deniability
• had been carefully established.
• Even good agents
• under less pressure
• have been known to crack.