Building on the work of Louis Pasteur andEd Jenner
Haffkine discovered that by passing cholera bacilli through the peritoneal cavity of guinea pigs
- 39 passes in total -
he could produce a strengthened, or "exalted" cholera culture: which he could then attenuate using heat.
An injection of the attenuated bacteria, followed later by an injection of the exalted bacteria
appeared to immunise guinea pigs against a lethal attack of the disease.
Up until that point, diseases like cholera had been thought of in miasmatic terms
- that they travelled in bad air -
FYI, Viewers/readers: Louis Pasteur invented Pasteurizaton :
ALL the MILK you drink today is bacteria free because of him
pas·teur·i·za·tion noun
the sterilization of a product, such as milk or wine, to make it safe for consumption !
A week after his success with guinea pigs in Paris, Haffkine replicated the results with rabbits and then pigeons.
He was ready for a human.
On 18 July 1892, Haffkine risked his life by injecting himself with attenuated cholera.
He suffered a fever for several days but recovered fully, and went on to inoculate three Russian friends
and then several other volunteers.
When each suffered no worse reaction, Haffkine was convinced he had a viable vaccine for wider testing.
The world's third plague pandemic began in Yunnan, China in 1894.
It spread down to British Hong Kong and from there by merchant ship
to the bustling coastal metropolis of Bombay in what was then British India
where the first case was discovered in September 1896
at a grain merchant's quarters at the city's docks.
The disease tore through Bombay's tightly-packed slums - its mortality rate nearly twice that of cholera -
and the number of dead soared. The governor turned to Haffkine for help. Haffkine travelled to Bombay
where he was set up in one small room and a corridor, with one clerk and three untrained assistants,
and tasked with coming up with the world's first plague vaccine from scratch.
In 1904, the plague reached its peak in India : killing 1,143,993 people
Haffkine's [size=5] Vaccine was the "main line of defence",
[img ]https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/11F22/production/_115660537_waldemar_haffkine_1964_stamp_of_india.jpg[/img]
26 million doses of anti-plague vaccine were sent out from Bombay, between 1897 and 1925
Tests of the vaccine's efficacy showed between a 50% and 85% reduction in mortality.
But "no figure" could be put on the number of lives he saved : "The numbers are just enormous."
Haffkine returned to France and devoted his later life to his faith, becoming increasingly orthodox !
He never married and lived his final years alone in Lausanne, Switzerland.
He was a "scholarly, lonesome, handsome man of few words, who remained a bachelor,"
wrote the Indian bacteriologist HI Jhala.
Haffkine died in Lausanne in 1930, aged 70.
A short obituary notice circulated by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that
his plague vaccine had been "adopted throughout India" and his lab had
"issued many thousands of doses to various tropical countries".
The notice also quoted Lord Lister, the great British bacteriologist
and pioneer of antiseptic surgery who called Haffkine, simply :
"the saviour of mankind".
[img ]https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/031C/production/_115669700_newobithaffkine.jpg[/img]
Men of Science and Medicine has been replaced by :
Conspiracy Theorist
with zero knowledge .....wot a ting .....hahahahahaha
