Anti-Tuberculosis Vaccine

Heretofore the only effective preventive against tuberculosis has been a vaccine invented by a French bacteriologist, Albert Calmette and a French veterinarian, Charles Guerin, This BCG vaccine has never been quite safe because it is composed of living attenuated tubercle bacilli, which sometimes are potent enough to cause fulminating tuberculosis.

Last week Drs. Eugene Lindsay Opie and Jules Freund of Cornell University Medical College reported in the Journal of Experimental Medicine a harmless preventive which they described as just as effective as BCG. They simply killed tubercle bacilli by heat and added heated horse serum. This protects an inoculated individual for one or two years, long enough, noted the doctors, "to influence favorably the delicate balance between asymptomatic or latent infection and progressive manifest disease that is characteristic of human tuberculosis."

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