The Rubella Epidemic

THE RUBELLA EPIDEMIC

Damaging Disease

Between 1963 and 1965 a rubella (German measles) epidemic swept the nation. It caused thirty thousand miscarriages; another twenty thousand pregnant women who contracted the disease gave birth to babies who suffered severe deformities, including blindness, deafness, limb defects, heart defects, and mental retardation. Infection in the first half of pregnancy meant a 50 percent chance that the baby would be affected. Later infections, in the second half of pregnancy, were less devastating (only 20 percent of babies were affected).

Identifying the Virus

Isolating the virus was the first step to developing a vaccine. Three different groups succeeded in identifying the rubella virus at about the same time: Drs. Paul Parkman and Edward L. Buescher at Walter Reed Army Institute for Research; Drs. Thomas Weiler and Franklin Neva at Harvard; and Drs. John L. Sever and Gilbert M. Schiff at the National Institute of Health (NIH). Dr. Parkman moved to the NIH and worked with Dr. Harry M. Meyer on finding a way to curb the growth of the virus. Together they were first to develop a test that determined a person's immunity to rubella. Their hemagglutination-inhibition test produced results in three hours instead of the three weeks required by the old testing method.

Which Vaccine Would Work?

The next step was development of the vaccine itself. The researchers started with an unsuccessful killed-virus vaccine. Next they tried a small amount of live virus in a vaccine, but this method simply gave people rubella. Then they decided on the most difficult technique—an attenuated, or weakened, virus vaccine. One way to attenuate a virus is to culture it repeatedly in nonhost cells. Because man is the host for rubella, the researchers grew the attenuated virus in kidney cells of monkeys, which are similar to those of man. By the seventy-seventh reculture in monkey kidney cells, the virus was sufficiently weakened. Parkman and Meyer used this HPV-77 strain for the vaccine.

Success

With the permission of the children's parents, physicians administered the vaccine to sixteen test patients at the Arkansas Children's Colony for retarded children. Eight were given the vaccine, and eight served as controls. These sixteen were housed together but away from anyone else. At the end of the test period, all had been exposed to rubella, but none of the children had gotten sick. Both the vaccine and its herd-immunity properties were proven. In 1969 the FDA approved a vaccine from Merck, Sharpe, and Dohme using the HPV-77 strain grown in duck embryo cells. The original Public Health Service recommendation was to vaccinate only prepubescent girls, the main concern being the possibility of a woman's being infected while in early preg-nancy. Soon the policy was changed, though, and women were vaccinated immediately following delivery.

SEX ED

In the spring of 1968 Dr. Gerald Sandson, a child psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and advocate of sex education, met with a group of fifty teachers and counselors who were attending a sex education workshop. He was not pleased with what he found: "Some had their own sexual axes to grind; others almost relished their new-found sanction to pronounce four-letter words." He also observed that "few showed any knowledge of child dynamics or an appreciation that this was a subject they should approach with care."

Sandson acknowledged that a second workshop sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools drew a more responsible and sensitive group of educators and that the first group he had observed might not have been truly representative. Nevertheless, his concerns remained, and Sandson concluded that if sex education was to be undertaken in the U.S., educators should receive proper training and counseling before being allowed to teach the subject. Based on what he had seen, Sandson believed that it was better for children to learn distorted information from their peers than from authorities in the classroom.

Source:

"Teacher Problems Crop Up," Science News, 94 (26 October 1968): 411-412.

Sources:

"Now: A Vaccine to Conquer Another Crippler," Reader's Digest, 94 (April 1969): 123-127;

"Rubella Vaccine Ready," Science News, 95 (21 June 1969): 595;

"To Protect the Unborn," Time, 93 (20 June 1969): 49.