Waldemar Haffkine: Encyclopedia II - Waldemar Haffkine - Anti-Plague vaccine

Waldemar Haffkine - Anti-Plague vaccine

In October 1896, an epidemic of bubonic plague struck Bombay and the government asked Haffkine to help. He embarked upon the development of a vaccine in a makeshift laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College. In three months of persistent work (one of his assistants got nervous breakdown, two others quit), a form for human trials was ready and on January 10, 1897 Haffkine tested it on himself. After these results were announced to the authorities, volunteers at the Byculla jail were inoculated and survived the epidemics, while seven inmates of the control group died.

Haffkine's successes in fighting the ongoing epidemics were undisputable, but some officials still insisted on old methods based on sanitarianism: washing homes by firehose with lime, herding affected and suspected persons in camps and hospitals, and restricting travel.

Even though the official Russia was still unsympathetic to his research, Haffkine's Russian colleagues doctors V.K. Vysokovich and D.K. Zabolotny visited him in Bombay and during the 1898 cholera outbreak, the vaccine called "лимфа Хавкина" ("limfa Havkina", Havkin's lymph) saved thousands of lives across the Russian Empire.

By the turn of the century, the number of inoculees in India alone reached four millions and doctor Haffkine was appointed the Director of the Plague Laboratory.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Anti-Plague vaccine", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki