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A bacteriologist who was a zoologist by training. Jew who liked to play the violin. Inventor of the cholera vaccine, from whose laboratory in Bombay, between 1897 and 1925, 26 million doses of the plague vaccine were shipped to the world. And although Queen Victoria, in recognition of his merits, gave Waldemar Haffkine a knighthood, a disastrous combination of events caused his career to collapse.
- Waldemar Haffkine left Odessa because, as a Jew, he could not continue his academic career there
- The first cholera vaccine developed by Haffkine had to be administered in two doses – first attenuated bacteria and then elevated bacteria
- Haffkine tested both vaccines for cholera and plague first on himself
- His career collapsed after Mulkowal villagers vaccinated by his team against the plague died of tetanus
- You can find more up-to-date information on the TvoiLokony home page
He vaccinated the Indian poor every day from dawn to dusk
The world met Waldemar Haffkine in 1894, when he came to India to track out cholera outbreaks. The spring season of the disease was just beginning, so the chances of locating the infection were good. Haffkine traveled there a year earlier to begin testing the preparation, later considered the first vaccine against cholera.
Nobody greeted him with open arms, on the contrary, both the British and the Indians were suspicious of him. Not only was he not a doctor but a zoologist, but also an immigrant from Odessa – a Jew.
Testing the new formulation was also not smooth. Firstly, the vaccine had to be administered in two doses, and the natives disappeared from sight forever after the first injection. Second, it was difficult to find an outbreak suitable for extensive testing. Haffkine, 33, vaccinated 23 thousand. people, but the epidemic just missed them, and it was difficult to determine whether the vaccine was working at all.
Luck smiled at him when he got an invitation to Calcutta. He ended up in Kattal Bagan, a slum inhabited by the poor on the outskirts of the city, where the only source of drinking water was a pond. He has finally found an ideal testing ground. Two people die of cholera at the end of the month in Kattal Bagan. Could it be the beginning of an epidemic? Haffkine vaccinated 116 of the approximately 200 slum dwellers and then watched developments unfold. It had 10 cases of the disease, seven of them fatalities, but all among the unvaccinated.
This success was enough for officials from Calcutta to finance another, this time more extensive, research. Unfortunately, earlier British medical programs had sowed distrust among the population and it was difficult to persuade anyone to vaccinate. The solution turned out to be cooperation with local doctors and assistants – the Indians. And to convince everyone of his ideas, Haffkine publicly injected himself with the vaccine.
As a result, after some initial resistance, people began to line up to him. The scientist spent whole days in the slums, starting vaccinations in the morning before people left for work, and finished in the evening when they returned.
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An assistant librarian is developing a cholera vaccine
Haffkine graduated in zoology from the University of Odessa in 1884, but as a Jew he could not continue his scientific work. In addition, he had political problems, as he clashed with cadets during one of the pogroms. He was beaten, arrested, but finally released.
In 1888 he left Our Country and went first to Geneva, where he was a teacher, and then to Paris. In the French capital, he took the position of assistant librarian at the Louis Pasteur Institute – a leading center for bacteriological research. He spent his free time in the library, he also experimented in a bacteriological laboratory and … played the violin.
Based on the work of Pasteur and Jenner, Haffkine discovered that when cholera is passed through the peritoneal cavity of guinea pigs, an enhanced (“elevated”) bacterial culture is produced, which can then be weakened by heat. The injection of attenuated or weakened bacteria followed by injection of the elevated ones immunized the guinea pigs against attack of cholera.
It was a breakthrough because until now cholera was considered a miasmatic disease, i.e. caused by pestilence air, and the fight against it consisted of spraying carbolic acid everywhere.
One week after the success of the vaccine in guinea pigs, Haffkine had equally promising results in rabbits and pigeons. The time has finally come for people.
He started with himself. On July 18, 1892, he injected himself with attenuated cholera. He had a fever for a few days… and that was it. When he recovered, he vaccinated three friends and then several volunteers. They all reacted similarly, which convinced Haffkine that he had obtained an effective vaccine. To test it, he should go to the epidemic site.
He was supposed to vaccinate against cholera and ended up developing a vaccine against the plague
In 1893, Lord Dufferin, the then British ambassador to Paris and former viceroy of India, heard of Haffkine’s preparation and offered him a trip to Bengal. The scientist began tests on thousands of tea plantation workers. Unfortunately, in the fall of 1895 he fell ill with malaria and had to return to England. However, by that time he managed to vaccinate almost 42 against cholera. people.
The vaccine significantly reduced the number of cases but did not reduce the mortality rate in those infected. When Haffkine returned to India after his recovery in 1896, he already had a new two-phase formula and planned to begin testing. Unfortunately, another more dangerous epidemic caused people to lose interest in cholera.
In 1894, the third plague pandemic began in the Chinese province of Yunnan. The disease quickly spread to British Hong Kong and from there by merchant ship to bustling Mumbai. The first case was discovered in September 1896. It was a grain trader living at the city docks.
Initially, the British government disregarded the epidemic in order to keep an important port functioning. However, the disease hit slum dwellers with the death rate almost twice as high as cholera. The governor turned to Haffkine for help. He immediately went to Bombay, where he was assigned a small room, one clerk and three untrained assistants. He was tasked with developing the world’s first plague vaccine.
“He didn’t have much space, manpower or equipment, but this was the first time he was working independently and had his own laboratory,” says Chandrakant Lahariya, an epidemiologist in Delhi. He knew that when he developed this vaccine, he would become the leading scientist of his time.
He worked tirelessly all winter. He found that when plague sticks are placed in a nutritious broth with clarified butter or coconut oil, the bacteria form a characteristic stalactite with toxins on the sides. He took a similar approach as with cholera. He combined the microbes with the toxins they produced. In December 1896 he vaccinated rabbits, and in January 1897 he was ready to test the plague vaccine on humans.
On January 10, 1897, he injected himself with 10 cm³ of his preparation. A dose much higher than the 3 cc he planned to administer. He got a high fever but recovered after a few days.
Late this month, the plague hit Mumbai in jail. Haffkine went there and vaccinated 147 prisoners, and did not vaccinate 172 people. There were 12 cases of plague and six deaths in the unvaccinated, and two cases and no deaths in the vaccinated.
This success saw Haffkine being transferred from a one-room laboratory to a government bungalow, and then into a large house owned by the local spiritual leader Aga Khan. The latter volunteered to be vaccinated, drawing thousands of members of his community with him. During the year, Haffkine vaccinated hundreds of thousands of Indians. Queen Victoria granted him a knighthood, and in December 1901 he was appointed managing director of the Bombay Plague Research Laboratory. The scientist was given exclusive use of several spacious rooms and a staff of 53.
Nobody expected a disaster
In March 1902, in the village of Mulkowal, Punjab, 19 people died of tetanus after being vaccinated against the plague with the Haffkine vaccine. 88 others vaccinated on the same day did not get sick. The evidence indicated that the serum bottle prepared 41 days earlier in his laboratory was contaminated.
The Indian government commission that investigated the case found that Haffkine had changed the vaccine sterilization procedures. He used heat instead of carbolic acid to speed up production. This method had been used at the Pasteur Institute for two years, but the British did not know it. A year later, the commission found that the bottle had been contaminated in the laboratory. Haffkine was dismissed from his managerial position and sent on indefinite leave. The humiliated scientist left India and went to London.
“In those days, people were ruled by prejudices,” says Dr. Barbara Hawgood, author of an article on Haffkine’s career. – And he wasn’t a doctor.
Prof. Eli Chernin, a Harvard public health specialist who studied Haffkine’s correspondence, wrote that “Haffkine was a victim of anti-Semitism.” In addition, he spoke English badly, and he was not good at writing. This is evidenced by the sketches of his letters to friends, which are “full of scribbles and cross-out marks, making them almost impossible to read.”
Two years after Haffkine’s departure, the plague has killed over a million people in India and the vaccine has become the “main line of defense”. Meanwhile, its creator was stuck in London, fighting for his good name.
Four years after the Mulkowal tragedy in 1906, the Indian government finally published the full results of its investigation, finding Haffkine guilty. King’s College London professor WJ Simpson wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal in which he passionately argued that the evidence points to accidental contamination of the bottle at a vaccination site in Punjab. He argued that first, no odor was registered when the bottle was opened, while a developed tetanus culture would have produced a foul odor. Second, when the bottle was examined 15 days later, only a weak bacterial culture was found there, so it could not be contaminated in Mumbai. Finally, and third, the tetanus of 19 victims progressed slowly, indicating a weak infection. If the bacterial culture had already been well developed in the bottle, these individuals “would have been attacked by fulminant tetanus.”
Most importantly, the investigation revealed that the assistant who opened the ill-fated bottle dropped the ticks on the ground and failed to properly sterilize them before using them to remove the cork from the bottle.
After Simpson’s letter was published, the Haffkine case was taken up by others. Nobel laureate Ronald Ross accused the British of “disregarding science” and warned that if Haffkine’s sentence was not lifted, the Indian government would show “gross ingratitude towards one of its greatest benefactors.”
Another visit to India turns out to be disappointing
After Simpson and Ross moved heaven and earth, even reaching the British Parliament, Haffkine was acquitted. He also obtained a permit to return to work in India and he willingly used it. However, on the spot, it turned out that he was forbidden to conduct any tests, limiting his activities to theoretical research.
The next seven years were a lost time for Haffkine. Of the 30 articles he wrote, only one has been published. He briefly returned to cholera research, developing a new “devitalized” vaccine with a method that later found widespread use. However, his requests to the GOI to test the preparation on each occasion were rejected.
In 1914, at the age of 55, Haffkine left India forever. He returned to France and devoted himself to creating a foundation to promote Jewish education in Eastern Europe. He never married and spent the last years alone in Lausanne.
He died in Lausanne in 1930 at the age of 70. The short obituary quoted Lord Lister, the great British bacteriologist and pioneer of antiseptic surgery, who called Haffkine “the savior of humanity.” Although he did not gain the fame he deserves, his name is still alive in India. In 1925, a group of his supporters applied for the name of the laboratory in which he worked “the Haffkine Institute.” The consent was granted and the name has remained to this day.
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