The Hindu : Front Page : Vaccine that ended smallpox destroyed

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Vaccine that ended smallpox destroyed

Atlanta: The U.S. government has announced it has said goodbye to one of the world’s greatest lifesavers — the original smallpox vaccine.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention this month made arrangements to dispose of its 12 million doses of Dryvax, and on Friday notified other health departments to do the same.

Dryvax, which is produced by scraping virus off the skin of infected calves, is being replaced in vaccine stockpiles by a modern product manufactured in laboratories.

Dryvax was unusually dangerous for a vaccine; in recent years it has been blamed for triggering heart attacks and a painful heart inflammation in some patients.

Still, attention should be paid on the occasion of its demise, said William Schaffner, chairman of Vanderbilt University’s department of preventive medicine.

It is a “historical moment, because it’s our oldest vaccine,” Dr. Schaffner said. “It was a vaccine that eliminated smallpox…”

Dryvax was created in the late 1800s, by the company that became Wyeth Laboratories. Wyeth was a primary U.S. manufacturer of smallpox vaccine by the mid-1940s, and was the only company left making it by the early 1960s, said D.A. Henderson, a University of Pittsburgh vaccine expert who played a key role in international smallpox eradication efforts. — AP

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