Description
The Vaccine Race
How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses
Author: WADMAN Meredith
Language: EnglishSubject for The Vaccine Race :
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Publication date: 02-2017
435 p. · Hardback
435 p. · Hardback
Description
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Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of children suffered crippling
birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly
known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little
understanding of how the disease devastated foetuses. In June 1962, a
young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted
foetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation
of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two
years later, in the midst of a devastating German measles epidemic, his
colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown
rubella. The rubella vaccine and others made with those foetal cells
have protected more than 150 million people in the United States, the
vast majority of them preschool children. The new cells and the method
of making them also led to vaccines that have protected billions of
people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles,
hepatitis A, shingles and adenovirus.
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