Mouse Brains v. Yellow Fever

Roosevelt I coveted a piece of the Panamanian Isthmus and took it for a Canal. But before diggers dared pervade that fever-infested series of swamps called "White Man's Grave," Sanitarian William Crawford Gorgas went ahead, chasing away the mosquitoes. Dr. Gorgas had learned about the fever-bearing mosquitoes in Cuba where Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay had indicted the insects and Dr. Walter Reed had convicted them. Their work enabled Dr. Gorgas to help make Havana the healthiest large city in the world, the Panama Canal an actuality. Similar work practically drove yellow fever from all North America, the West Indies and many infected regions of the world where the creation of wealth makes expensive effort worth while. But yellow fever has simply been kept away from such regions and by no means wiped off the earth, as most people suppose.

Last week a Paris dispatch reported another and possibly more effective attack on yellow fever. Immunologist Jean Laigret of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis announced that he had successfully vaccinated 3,000 individuals against yellow fever at Dakar, French West Africa, which is achieving business importance as a French hop-off for South Atlantic aviation. If wholesale vaccination is possible, whole populations can be protected against yellow fever as simply and thoroughly as they now are protected against smallpox. And communities will not be encumbered by the expensive necessity of eradicating yellow fever mosquitoes.

The Laigret vaccine comes from the brains of mice which have been infected with yellow fever virus. When Dr. Max Theiler, now of Manhattan's Rockefeller Foundation, discovered that the virus could be fostered in mouse brains, investigators experimented with the use of his mouse-brain virus as a vaccine. They found that while monkeys inoculated with it developed immunity to yellow fever, they were also likely to develop inflammation of the brain, in many respects as bad as yellow fever. It was then proved that a mixture of mouse brains and serum from human beings who had recovered from yellow fever was a safe vaccine. But enough such serum for wholesale vaccination is impossible to accumulate, and yellow fever remained unbeaten.

Dr. Laigret, an enterprising man, tried unsuccessfully to get authority to inoculate Frenchmen with mouse-brain virus alone. In Tunis he was successful. When vaccinated Tunisians showed suspicious reactions (fever, hemorrhages). Dr. Laigret decided that he had used unduly big doses, and moved to French West Africa. The success which he announced last week was due, he said, to minute doses of the infected mouse brains.

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