August 2010

Before Robert Chanock, MD, joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 1957, researchers had not identified a culprit for a constellation of serious respiratory illnesses that affected infants and children each year, particularly in the winter. Soon after Chanock joined NIAID’s Laboratory of Infectious diseases, however, he and his colleagues identified and named the virus: respiratory syncytial virus. RSV, as it is commonly known, is the most common cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia among American children less than one year of age.

When asked if he had any advice for parents worried about RSV, Chanock alluded to the virus’s tendency to spread during the winter and famously quipped (though he noted that there was some truth to the remark) that parents should have their babies in the spring. Through his research efforts, however, he and his colleagues provided a better form of protection against the virus: an antibody to protect against RSV in infants at high risk for RSV illnesses.

Throughout his career, a great deal of Chanock’s research was in the field of respiratory disease. He collaborated with other researchers to discover parainfluenza viruses that cause childhood respiratory illnesses, isolate strains of the virus that causes the common cold, and isolate one of the causes of bacterial pneumonia. More

You might not be able to make it to Rio de Janeiro, but you can join the conference“Smallpox Eradication after 30 years: Lessons, Legacies and Innovations.” Organizers are the SabinVaccine Institute,  Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, and the Fogarty International Center. The conference dates are August 24-27.

Live streaming video and a conference schedule are available at this link. (Rio is one hour later than Eastern Daylight Time.) We’re especially looking forward to Session 1, Lessons from Smallpox-Endemic countries: Illuminating experiences in program conception and execution, which is moderated by DA Henderson, MD. See our interview with him here: The History of Vaccines Interviews DA Henderson, MD.

Follow the smallpox symposium on Twitter using the hashtag #Smallpox2010. More

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA and commonly pronounced “MER-sah,” is a serious problem in hospital settings. Although this particular type of S. aureus bacteria does infect people outside of medical facilities (typically referred to as “community-acquired infection”) it is more serious in healthcare environments, causing potentially life-threatening infection. In 2005, more than 18,000 people died during hospital stays related to serious MRSA infection.

As bacteria continue to develop resistance to more and more antibiotics, the development of vaccines to prevent infection with resistant bacteria becomes more important. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago have identified a possible approach for the development of a vaccine against MRSA.

MRSA has proved difficult as a vaccine target because of its ability to suppress the body’s immune response. Most vaccines exploit the fact that the immune system will respond in a certain way in order to confer protection against future disease. Even natural MRSA infection, however, does not confer such future immunity, making vaccine development against it tricky. More

This week we’ve heard about two far-flung imported measles cases. One is in our backyard: a 47-year-old Pennsylvania woman traveled to Malawi, which has been experiencing a measles outbreak, and brought a case home with her. Another brings back memories of the 2008 San Diego measles outbreak: an unvaccinated child traveled to Europe and returned with the illness.

In the San Diego case, authorities have identified five locations where people may have been exposed to the virus. The story is here.

The Pennsylvania case was described in a notice from a county health department, listing seven locations where the traveler may have exposed others between July 27-August 3, including the Philadelphia International Airport and a suburban Philadelphia Whole Foods grocery store. An email sent out by a local politician claimed that the Whole Foods had agreed to post a sign notifying customers of the possible exposure. On a quick visit to the store, however, I failed to find the sign, and the staff I talked to there didn’t know about the incident. More

Darin Hayton, PhD, recently wrote a post for The Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science blog about Marie Curie’s 1923 visit to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. While here, Curie presented the College with her piezo-electric apparatus (which later needed to be decontaminated). At this event, Robert Abbe, about whom we have written, donated to the College his collection of Louis Pasteur memorabilia.

Please take a look: History of Science in Philadelphia: Curie’s Early Piezo-Electric Apparatus

Many of the items from the Curie and Pasteur collections are on display in the lobby of the College, and others are held in the Historical Medical Library. More

Early in our vaccine research at The Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, we came across an interesting reprint from a 1911 medical journal. In honor of the anniversary of the birth of the article’s subject, we’ll share some of the images here.

Sir Almroth Edward Wright, born August 10, 1861, died 1947, was a British bacteriologist who co-developed an inactivated typhoid vaccine (1896) and pneumococcal vaccine (1911). He promoted the use of autogenous vaccines for bacterial infections—that is, removing bacteria from a patient’s own infection and inactivating it, and then treating the patient with the material. This type of therapy became largely obsolete with the development of antimicrobials.

As one book reviewer states, Wright had “a deep aversion to statistics,” and some of Wright’s own claims for efficacy of his vaccines were difficult or impossible to evaluate. (Wright was colorful in other ways: he opposed women’s suffrage to such a degree that he wrote a 1913 treatise titled The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage, from which we will avoid quoting here–as this post is, remember, in honor of his birthday. You are, however, invited to read it at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5183.) Wright’s typhoid vaccine, however, was shown to be effective in a large trial by the British War Board, and it protected thousands of soldiers in the British Army during World War I. More

In 1954, Thomas C. Peebles, MD, was working in the laboratory of John F. Enders, PhD, at Boston Children’s Hospital. Earlier, Enders had contributed to work on tissue culture that helped in the development of vaccines for polio; now, he wanted Peebles to focus on the measles.

During an outbreak of the disease at a private school outside of Boston, Peebles set out to isolate the measles virus. After getting permission from the school’s principal, Peebles collected blood samples from each of the sick boys at the school, telling them: “Young man, you are standing on the frontiers of science.”

On February 8, Peebles succeeded, collecting measles virus-laden blood from 13-year-old David Edmonston. This virus would eventually be used to create measles vaccines, and, the measles component of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine used today is still grown using the Edmonston strain. More

In honor of National Immunization Awareness Month, we look at one of the diseases that immunization has nearly eliminated in the United States…

One of the fascinating things about the history of vaccinology is how quickly late 19th century researchers moved from identifying microbes as the cause of certain diseases to developing ways to treat and immunize people.

Diphtheria is a case in point. Edwin Klebs (1834-1913), a Swiss-German pathologist, identified and described the bacterium that causes diphtheria in 1883. (Just to point out the devastation that diphtheria caused, in 1883, the diphtheria death rate was 125 per 100,000 people in New York City.) A year later, German bacteriologist Friedrich Loeffler (1852-1915) became the first to cultivate Corynebacterium diphtheriae, and he then showed that C. diphtheriae produces a toxin. More