The History of Vaccines Blog

Day 2 of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases Annual Conference on Vaccine Research included a focus on maternal immunization. Carol J. Baker, MD, of Baylor College of Medicine, opened the session (much to our pleasure!) with the history of evidence of the effectiveness of maternal immunization for preventing disease in newborns via passive transfer of antibodies via placenta or breastmilk. It’s generally accepted that this passive immunity, for some diseases, benefits the baby for about the first six months of life. We haven’t had a chance to look up her references, but she mentioned evidence from 1879 that showed vaccination with vaccinia prevented smallpox in infants, from 1938 showing that maternal immunization with whole-cell pertussis vaccine protected infants from pertussis complications, from 1961 showing vaccine-induced  tetanus immunity transfer from mother to baby in New Guinea, and, finally, from 2011 leading to recommendation of pertussis-containing vaccine and influenza vaccine for pregnant women. More

 Hilary Koprowski, Fellow of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and a member of the advisory board for The History of Vaccines, died on April 11, 2013. He was 96 years old. Born in Poland in 1915, Koprowski’s long tenure in vaccine research began in 1939 when he received an M.D. degree from the University of Warsaw. After moving to the United States, he developed the first live oral polio vaccine to be used in large-scale trials, administered to the first child in 1950. More

Instead of a teething ring, I had a passport. Between a military father and diplomatic step-father, my family moved every year or two or three to exotic places, from Taiwan to the Philippines to Ecuador. Tucked into my passport was another essential travel document, the International Certificates of Vaccination issued by the federal government, a yellow-paper catalog of inoculations with separate pages for smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera. When traveling during the 1950s and 1960s, before computerized databases, immigration officials examined my passport in one hand, the dog-eared vaccination record in the other. Reviewing the vaccination record now, I still derive the same satisfaction that I experienced as a school kid in reading my vaccination history—which we kids called our “shot records”--as a chronology of health accomplishment, a medical report card. A visit to the doctor before taking a trip became so routine that I ceased to fear needle punctures. Rather, I looked forward to having the administering physician sign and return my vaccination record. More

Thanks to Joshua Prasad, MPH student at Drexel University School of Public Health, for putting together the information from the White House in an easy-to-read way. Most of you are probably following the news about the potential sequester that may begin on March 1. If US lawmakers can’t come to an agreement to avert the sequester, many federal agencies and programs will need to make across the board budget cuts of 10%. One area in which the cuts may be felt is seasonal influenza response and planning. Representative Henry Waxman summarized CDC Director Tom Friedan’s description of the effects of sequestration on CDC’s influenza immunization activities in the following way: More