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Anthrax vaccine: It took 80 years
After the smallpox vaccine of 1799, little happened in infectious disease for fifty years. Physicians decided that disease was part of life, it existed within us and could not be eradicated, leading to a philosophy of “therapeutic nihilism.” Doctors could follow the course of tuberculosis with stethoscopes as it ate through a lung, but did not hope to stop the process.
Nursing and nutrition improved during the 1850s and 1860s (think Florence Nightingale).Sanitation would soon have a beneficial effect on health, but the idea that disease came from infection by bacteria, viruses, or fungi, occurred to no one. Until Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast and bacteria act on beef broth, grape mash, andflour to alter them—in beef broth by putrefaction and degradation of proteins, in grape mash by converting sugar to alcohol and inbread by making carbon dioxide causing bread to rise, puffed up by the CO2.
Louis Pasteur was from Artois in the Jura mountains where the wine was awful.He looked at it with a microscope, expecting to find yeast—recognizable spheres with buds, but found yeast and contaminating bacteria. He told the vintners to start again with pure yeast and to clean all their equipment with heat. The wine improved. (Pasteurization was first used to preserve wine, not milk.)The eventual result was the Germ Theory of Fermentation, Putrefaction, and Disease. Pasteur became famous and repeated his success with diseases of silk moths and sour beer. It was a fertile theory and remains so.
Chemists of the mid-19th century hated the germ theory. They could not bear to see their tidy chemical equations corrupted by bacteria or yeast. They thought it was a form of mystical vitalism, but had no alternative theory to explain how sugar turns into other molecules. They conceded, but it took decades.
Physicians could not believe that anything as small as bacteria could fell a human being and many of them believed in spontaneous generation of bacteria from inert chemicals, an idea that Pasteur destroyed. Physicians thought he was an unqualified upstart, a charlatan poaching on their territory. Pasteur, a fine speaker and something of a showman, returned their contempt.
In the 1870s, French cattle were suffering from lethal anthrax infections; farmers lost 15% of their herds.
What of the long gap between vaccines?From about 1850, Pasteur and his students and Joseph Lister in Scotland, worked out ways to grow and examine bacteria and yeast in beef broth or other nutrient liquids.They disproved spontaneous generation andlearned that microorganisms could grow without oxygen, that anthrax bacteria could make heat resistant spores, and that bacteria could be kept out of wounds, reducing infection.
In the 1870s, French cattle were suffering from lethal anthrax infections; farmers lost 15% of their herds. The Minister of Agriculture asked Pasteur for help, and he sent two assistants to a farm near Chartres where cattle, sheep and pigs were dying. The assistants reported to Pasteur, who asked about birds.Ducks, chickens, and geese were thriving.
How to account for this? Pasteur knew that birds have an internal temperature of 42 degrees C, while mammals live at 37 degrees C.The difference is 9 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a lot. He asked if the small opaque bodies, called batonettes, found in the blood of cattle or sheep dying of anthrax were bacteria that would grow in beef broth. They did. He then injected a hen with batonettes. Nothing happened. When he cooled the hen in a bath it sickened. Removed from the bath the hen recovered.
He reasoned that if he grew the bacteria at 42 degree C in beef broth they might lose the ability to kill at 37 degrees C.They did. The bacteria, Bacillus anthracis, were attenuated, they had lost some function (a piece of DNA as it turned out) but still grew. These bacteria formed the basis for a sheep and cattle vaccine. These bacteria were called the Pasteur vaccine strain and was used for many years. (My lab worked with it until we learned, just after 9/11, when there was anthrax terrorist attack, that the FBI and CDC test for anthrax did not recognize the vaccine strain as harmless. Not wanting to scare people, we killed our cultures with superheated steam.)
A trial took place in a village called Pouilly-le-fort, Southeast of Paris. Twenty-five sheep were inoculated with attenuated Bacillus anthracis and 25 were left alone. Two weeks later the 25 inoculated sheep were given a booster. After another two weeks all 50 sheep got a dose of virulent bacteria. In two days, the unvaccinated sheep were very sick, the vaccinated sheep were healthy. In later tests, the same held true for cattle. Pasteur, who knew what was at stake for farmers, agriculture, and medicine, paced in his lab at The École Normale Supérieur in Paris. Finally, a telegram arrived. It read Succès Épatant! (Stunning Success).
Richard Kessin, PhDis Professor Emeritus of Pathology and Cell Biology at The Columbia University Irvine Medical Center.
People use a word, “disinformation,” loosely because it means nothing more than words spewed out devoid of actual meaning, context, proof, fact, or ownership.
That does not mean those words were spewed without intent, written without intent, broadcast without intent. The old adage of “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” was wrong when I was a kid and even more wrong in the age in which we live, where words can travel to millions of people instantaneously, permanently circulating, always causing harm. I’ll take physical sticks and stones over diarrheal vituperous words promulgated on the Internet any day.
The world we are entering, where a sole person can decide to rename a 600-year-old, internationally accepted place name as a whim requires us to stop and think of the dystopian world that’s being built around us, for us, encaging us, corrupting us. The Gulf of Mexico being renamed may seem like a trivial matter as it rebounds to and is endorsed by Google, MSN, and other Internet platforms. However — at a stroke — truth and fact have been obliterated. This is a modern form of book-burning. Once burned, those books cannot be re-read, cannot be learned from, cannot influence thinking and intelligence. The Gulf of Mexico as historic fact has been obliterated, sanctioned by the very backbone of the Internet providers.
But, like book burning in the ‘30s, they have shown their hand, their capitulation to the new dystopian world; no doubt for profit or ideology. It doesn’t matter which. The fact is this, if you know it is the Gulf of Mexico, has been for 600 years, and someone tells you it is no longer named so, then you can easily decide if that someone is to be trusted. If not, tell everyone you know that they are wrong. Don’t simply roll over. In short, you have to decide if you want to join the book burners or stand against their intent and distortion of fact and reality. Speak up.
Acceptance without revolt is capitulation, corruption of your very being. How do you revolt against such entities as Google, MSN and others? Probably you cannot. But then at least you will know that whatever they make, whatever they promote, whatever they post is not to be blindly trusted ever again. Remember, if it seems false, if it smells like smoke, it is likely a form of book burning in the modern Internet age. You can check, you can become a gatekeeper of truth. You have to. If you don’t, they have won and the world as you know it will not survive.
A solution? Read actual books. Rejoin your library, become a supporter of literary fact, research, and time-tested fact.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
Inaugural ‘Gospel Preaching’ with gentle voice and strength
Text: Luke 4:14-22
One month ago at the Inaugural Prayer Service, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde preached a call for “unity that incorporates diversity and transcends disagreement — and the solid foundations of dignity, honesty, and humility that such unity requires.”
Initially, her sermon elicited nods of approval: who could object, to a goal so noble? She concluded with a plea for mercy, delivered directly to the president: mercy for those who are LGBT+; mercy for those who are not citizens or lack documentation, mercy for those fleeing war and persecution, mercy for any who might be seen as a “stranger.” All of whom, in today’s United States of America, live in fear.
Some responses levied blistering criticism against Bishop Budde. Accusations of politicizing an event that ought to have been above politics. Calls for her to be deported.Denunciation of her status as bishop because she is a woman. Disparagement of her tone.
She preached the Gospel, with a gentle voice and with strength. She relayed Jesus’ teachings, and their implications today. In that setting, the Gospel stung.
The Bible’s uncomfortable teaching says that we who believe in God may not be first in line to receive mercy. But if we are to follow Jesus, we had better be the first in line to act mercifully — regardless of whether we think the recipient is deserving, because in God’s sight mercy is a measure of the giver, not the receiver. God is no tribal deity, belonging to one people only, and God will pour out saving help on any person in need, including unbelievers and those whom our society decides to expel.
The Bible is full of references to land and borders, and wars fought over the same, but Jesus flagrantly ignored borders, crossing them at will.
There are thoughtful arguments, both secular and religious, in favor of protecting borders. Yet Jesus did not make them, and they contradict a core Gospel teaching: those who would follow Jesus’ Way are to consider every person on this planet as a family member, whose well-being is as important as our own.
To the argument that talk of immigrants or LGBT+ neighbors or economy is political talk, inappropriate in a religious setting: read the prophets and the Gospels. The Bible’s religious topics — by definition, religious topics — are resolutely focused on the wellness of all living beings, and how we treat one another, and how we organize our common life. When a policy or an administration has created hardship, especially for those who are vulnerable in our society, it is not the church or synagogue or mosque or meeting or gurdwara wading inappropriately into political territory, it is the politicians flouting the core message of God’s Living Word.
In the Gospel, might does not make right — vulnerability makes right. In the Gospel, there is no justification for harsh treatment or expulsion of persons who are here illegally — because every person is our neighbor, and such laws fail God’s requirements of morality and mercy. In the Gospel, the accumulation of wealth is a grotesque abomination — an act of blatant infidelity which deserves no reward, and certainly no position of influence. In the Gospel, there is no outsider in God’s eyes, only in human eyes, and God often will give first attention to someone we think of as unfit or undeserving or unwelcome as if to deliver a message laser focused on each believer: “Your way to me, beloved, is through a loving relationship with them. Your way to me is by all of ‘them’ becoming ‘us.’”
In times and circumstances that are hostile to Gospel values, preaching the Gospel will sting. God knows, all that I am saying may be dismissed as political. Call it what you will. I take my stand on the Gospel, and I pray to be accountable to the Gospel alone.
From Sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Salisbury, UCC, Salisbury,on the Third Sunday after Epiphany,Jan. 26, 2025.