Vaccine for Measles

A vaccine against measles is at last in sight. This momentous news was announced last week to a Manhattan conference of virus experts by Harvard's famed Virologist John Franklin Enders, winner of a Nobel Prize for developing the tissue-culture foundation on which the Salk polio vaccine was built.

Measles has been around so long and is so nearly universal among dense populations that it is widely regarded as an unavoidable childhood disease. But measles is a severe illness, definitely dangerous for children under three and for adults; it can lead to pneumonia and severe middle-ear infections (though in well-doctored areas these are now contained by antibiotics). It can also cause brain inflammation with high (10%) mortality and a higher rate of permanent damage; there is a fulminating (fortunately rare) form called hemorrhagic or black measles that swiftly causes death.

Choosy Virus. What has held up the men of medicine in developing a vaccine against measles is the finicky nature of the virus. Man alone seems to be its natural host. The only lower species that can be infected with it are monkeys. For years, researchers reported growing measles virus in other animals or fertilized eggs, only to have the submicroscopic particles vanish. This line of attack proved so disappointing that Dr. Enders (Ph.D.) gave it up 20 years ago.

With tissue culture (1949) the picture changed. Last week Enders spelled out the many immensely detailed steps that began with growing the virus (from patients' throats or blood) in human kidney cells. Along the way it was found that the virus caused sharply defined changes in the growth pattern of the cells on which it battened. This led to a valuable and simple test for showing the presence of live virus and also measuring immunity. For the live test in monkeys, Dr. Enders found, he had to get the animals by air. hot from the Philippine jungle, to make sure they had not been accidentally infected.

Unto the 72nd Generation. Finally, Researcher Enders picked a virus strain that had gone through 24 crops in human kidney cells and 28 in cells from the amniotic sac ("bag of waters"). By then, it would grow in eggs. He grew six crops that way and 14 in chick-cell cultures. With this end product he inoculated fresh, measles-free monkeys. The weakened virus lived a while in their throats but never multiplied in their blood. The monkeys developed antibodies which, months later, still gave protection. One major problem remained: to show that the weakened virus, which might be used as a vaccine, cannot cause encephalitis. Enders' research teams at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Children's Hospital are in the midst of that task, with results to date encouraging.

Even with the aid of the public-address system, soft-spoken Researcher Enders was scarcely audible at last week's meeting. But when he had finished, Cincinnati's Dr. Albert Sabin yelled: "John. youVe done it again!" The assembled virologists broke ranks, stood and cheered him.

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