On This Day: Pasteur uses rabies vaccine on boy mauled by rabid dog - July 6, 1885

[jgo]

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Pasteur produced the first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits, and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue. The rabies vaccine was initially created by Emile Roux, a French doctor and a colleague of Pasteur, who had produced a killed vaccine using this method. The vaccine had been tested in 50 dogs before its first human trial. This vaccine was used on 9-year-old Joseph Meister, on 6 July 1885, after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog.

This was done at some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy. After consulting with physicians, he decided to go ahead with the treatment. Over 11 days, Meister received 13 inoculations, each inoculation using viruses that had been weakened for a shorter period of time. Three months later he examined Meister and found that he was in good health.

Pasteur was hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued. Later in 1885, people, including four children from the United States, went to Pasteur's laboratory to be inoculated. In 1886, he treated 350 people, of which only one developed rabies. The treatment's success laid the foundations for the manufacture of many other vaccines. The first of the Pasteur Institutes was also built on the basis of this achievement
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

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[Grins]

1. In the book, "Rabid"

The book came out in 2013. About “the most fatal virus known to science.” Read the book review and went out and bought it.

Fascinating! Reads like a novel. Lots of stuff I never knew. Scary, too.

The book covers Pasteur and the infected Americans he treated. When they survived it was front page news in US papers.