BCG Breakthrough

U.S. doctors had hesitated for 25 years to make the plunge, but last week they finally did. The U.S. Public Health Service announced that it had decided to make a big-scale test of BCG,* the anti-tuberculosis vaccine. Somewhere in the South, in a community with a high T.B. deathrate, PHS will soon have under way the first U.S. experiment in community-wide immunization against T.B. by vaccinating 100,000 people.

BCG vaccine is made from weakened tubercle bacilli. It immunizes by building up a person's resistance through a mild infection.

Despite its wide use abroad (in Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada, South America), U.S. authorities have been leary of BCG because 1) they feared that the original mild infection might in time become severe, 2) an experiment with poorly prepared BCG once caused a disastrous T.B. outbreak in Luebeck, Germany.

They yielded, finally, to the persuasive arguments of one of the world's great T.B. experts: Denmark's Dr. Johannes Holm. Dr. Holm is so convinced of BCG's worth that during the war he took the risk of smuggling the vaccine to Danish prisoners in German concentration camps.

Two months ago, at an unpublicized conference of top U.S. specialists in Washington, Dr. Holm produced his carefully documented evidence: he and his co-workers had immunized 250,000 Danes, cut their T.B. deathrate to one-seventh that of the unvaccinated. BCG, he said, "is absolutely safe." The clincher: a U.S. test of 3,000 Indians which produced the same impressive results (TIME, June 24).

For the big experiment, PHS will choose not only a community with a high T.B. deathrate, but one with few T.B. hospital beds. Among the chief guinea pigs: nurses and other hospital workers constantly exposed to T.B. infection. The vaccine, barred from commercial manufacture, will be produced in PHS's own laboratory.

* For "Bacillus of Calmette and Guerin," the two French scientists who developed the vaccine in cattle and first used it on human patients in 1921.

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