Not elder law: world’s oldest vaccine has been destroyed

he government announced Friday that it has said goodbye to one ofthe world’s greatest lifesavers — the oldest smallpox vaccine. The U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month made arrangementsto dispose of the last of its 12 million doses of Dryvax, and notifiedother health departments and the military to do the same by Feb. 29.  Dryvax is beingreplaced in federal vaccine stockpiles by a more modern productmanufactured in laboratories.  Dryvax was unusually dangerous fora vaccine, blamed in recent years for triggering heart attacks and apainful heart inflammation in some patients.  Still, attentionshould be paid on the occasion of its demise, said Dr. WilliamSchaffner, chairman of Vanderbilt University’s department of preventivemedicine.

It is a “historical moment, because it’s our oldestvaccine,” Schaffner said. “It was a vaccine that eliminated smallpoxfrom the United States.”  Smallpox is a deadly, infectious diseasethat plagued the world for centuries and killed nearly a third of thepeople it infected. Victims suffered scorching fever and body aches,then spots and blisters that would leave survivors with pitted scars.  Dryvaxwas created in the late 1800s, by the company that became WyethLaboratories. Wyeth was a primary U.S. manufacturer of smallpox vaccineby the mid-1940s, and was the only company left making it by the early1960s, said Dr. D.A. Henderson, a University of Pittsburgh vaccineexpert who played a key role in international smallpox eradicationefforts.

Source/more:  The Associated Press, http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hNsTAryr0vXYW27JPTentgNimeTAD8V4BL3O0