Defeating the Ministers of Death by David Isaacs

Author:David Isaacs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Lübeck tragedy

These American cautionary tales were not heeded sufficiently elsewhere. BCG vaccine to protect against tuberculosis was first made in France in 1921. In December 1929, the Lübeck General Hospital in northern Germany started to offer BCG vaccine to newborn babies, to reduce the risk of catching TB. Vials of BCG vaccine were shaken and some vaccine was added to a spoon of warm breast milk and given to the babies to drink.

Tragically, some vaccine vials were inadvertently contaminated with live Mycobacterium tuberculosis from the laboratory where the BCG was prepared. Over the next four months, 251 newborn babies were fed contaminated vaccine. While older children and adults usually develop no symptoms when infected with TB, newborns are more susceptible. Before they were three months old, babies delivered at the hospital were starting to die at a much higher rate than expected. Within a year, 90% of babies given the contaminated vaccine had developed clinical or X-ray evidence of TB, mostly in the lymph nodes, and 72 babies had died.

The Lübeck accident was global news, and a setback to acceptance of immunisation in general and BCG vaccine in particular. To this day, the United States and the Netherlands have never routinely immunised children with BCG.

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