1921

Tuberculosis vaccine

• Camille Guérin’s father
• and his wife
• died of tuberculosis. There was no cure
• and no antibiotic.
• *
• People called it consumption, phthisis,
• scrofula,
• King’s evil, white plague, and it goes back
• nine thousand years,
• older than Egyptian
• mummies.
• *
• Guérin was a veterinarian and worked with Albert Calmette
• producing snake antivenom.
• Edward Jenner had shown that innoculation with cowpox
• armed the body against smallpox.
• Too bad, bovine TB bacillum wasn’t benign the way
• cowpox was.
• Together, they began to work with bovine TB bacillum,
• to find a way
• to weaken it so that it could immunize without
• causing TB.
• They found that a glycerin-bile-potato medium grew the bacilli
• and weakened it.
• *
• Thirteen years later after isolating and subculturing a new strain 239 times
• eventually
• resulted in a vaccine that could be safely used on humans but also immunized
• against TB.

Treatment and prevention

• Injecting an attenuated bovine bacillum
• into the skin of the arm of a newborn
• doesn’t sound great, but it works,
• and it’s miles beyond
• the Egyptian treatment, which was
• “surgical lancing of the cyst
• and the application of a ground mixture
• of acacia gum, peas, fruits, animal blood,
• insect blood, honey, and salt.”
• The Egyptian treatment probably caused
• more problems than it cured.
• Akhenaten and Nefertiti died of TB.
• It was no better in India, where
• you could be treated with various meats,
• breast milk, alcohol, and rest, and advised
• to move to a higher altitude, or in China
• where the disease was either recognized
• to be uncurable, or cured by burning
• and inhaling the smoke of magic talismans,
• or in ancient Greece where Galen advised
• “blood letting and eating barley water, fish, and fruit.”

Leprosy

• BCG vaccination also protects you from leprosy.
• You just don’t want to get leprosy, and there are other ways
• to avoid it. In the U.S., mainly you just want to avoid
• armadillos. If you spend too much time with an armadillo
• and pick up a case of leprosy, isolation in a special clinic
• and a treatment of antibiotics over a course of six
• to twenty-four months should take care of the problem.

Never coughing

• Where she grew up,
• tuberculosis was feared.
• In her village, so many
• people died of it.
• Her father died of it.
• When she was a child,
• so as not to worry her mother,
• she never coughed.