Russian anthrax vaccines
Anthrax vaccines were developed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and available for use in humans by 1940. A live attenuated, unencapsulated spore vaccine became widely used for humans. It was given either by scarification or subcutaneously and its developers claimed that it was reasonably well tolerated and showed some degree of protective efficacy against cutaneous anthrax in clinical field trials. The efficacy of the live Russian vaccine was reported to have been greater than that of either of the killed British or US anthrax vaccines (AVP and AVA, respectively) during the 1970s and 80s. Today both Russia and China use live attenuated strains for their human vaccines. These vaccines may be given by aerosol, scarification, or subcutaneous injection. A Georgian/Russian live anthrax spore vaccine (called STI) was based on spores from the Sterne strain of B. anthracis. It was given in a two-dose schedule, but serious side-effects restricted its use to healthy adults. It was reportedly manufactured at the George Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology and Virology in Tbilisi, Georgia, until 1991. British anthrax vaccines
British biochemist Harry Smith (1921–2011), working for the UK bio-weapons program at Porton Down, discovered the three anthrax toxins in 1948. This discovery was the basis of the next generation of antigenic anthrax vaccines and for modern antitoxins to anthrax. The widely used British anthrax vaccine—sometimes called Anthrax Vaccine Precipitated (AVP) to distinguish it from the similar AVA (see below)—became available for human use in 1954.
This discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases and Pasteur gave these artificially weakened diseases the generic name "vaccines", in honor of Jenners groundbreaking discovery. In 1885, Pasteur produced his celebrated first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue. In 1995, the centennial of Pasteurs death, The New York Times ran an article titled "Pasteurs Deception". After having thoroughly read Pasteurs lab notes, the science historian Gerald L. Geison declared Pasteur had given a misleading account of the preparation of the anthrax vaccine used in the experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort. The same year, Max Perutz published a vigorous defense of Pasteur in The New York Review of Books. Sternes vaccine
The Austrian-South African immunologist Max Sterne (1905–1997) developed an attenuated live animal vaccine in 1935 that is still employed and derivatives of his strain account for almost all veterinary anthrax vaccines used in the world today. Beginning in 1934 at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Research Institute, north of Pretoria, he prepared an attenuated anthrax vaccine, using the method developed by Pasteur. A persistent problem with Pasteurs vaccine was achieving the correct balance between virulence and immunogenicity during preparation. This notoriously difficult procedure regularly produced casualties among vaccinated animals. With little help from colleagues, Sterne performed small-scale experiments which isolated the "Sterne strain" (34F2) of anthrax which became, and remains today, the basis of most of the improved livestock anthrax vaccines throughout the world.