Waldemar Haffkine - Anti-plague Vaccine

Anti-plague Vaccine

"Unlike tetanus or diphtheria, which were quickly neutralized by effective vaccines by the 1920's, the immunological aspects of bubonic plague proved to be much more daunting." In October 1896, an epidemic of bubonic plague struck Bombay (now Mumbai) and the government asked Haffkine to help. He embarked upon the development of a vaccine in a makeshift laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College. In three months of persistent work (one of his assistants experienced a nervous breakdown, two others quit), a form for human trials was ready and on January 10, 1897 Haffkine tested it on himself. "Haffkine's vaccine used a small amount of the bacteria to produce an immune reaction." After these results were announced to the authorities, volunteers at the Byculla jail were inoculated and survived the epidemics, while seven inmates of the control group died. "Like others of these early vaccines, the Haffkine formulation had nasty side effects, and did not provide complete protection, though it was said to have reduced risk by up to 50 percent."

Haffkine's successes in fighting the ongoing epidemics were indisputable, but some officials still insisted on old methods based on sanitarianism: washing homes by fire hose with lime, herding affected and suspected persons into camps and hospitals, and restricting travel.

Even though the official Russia was still unsympathetic to his research, Haffkine's Russian colleagues doctors V.K. Vysokovich and D.K. Zabolotny visited him in Bombay. During the 1898 cholera outbreak in the Russian Empire, the vaccine called "лимфа Хавкина" ("limfa Havkina", Havkin's lymph) saved thousands of lives across the empire.

By the turn of the 20th century, the number of inoculees in India alone reached four million and doctor Haffkine was appointed the Director of the Plague Laboratory in Bombay (now called Haffkine Institute).

Haffkine was the first to prepare a vaccine for human prophylaxis by killing virulent culture by heat at 60°C. The major limit of his vaccine was the lack of activity against pulmonary forms of plague.