The Story of the Measles Vaccine
[객원 에디터 4기 / 한동민 기자] Samuel Lawrence Katz, a scientist who saved millions of lives, died recently at the age of 95. Katz began studying measles in 1956 to develop a measle vaccine as he joined a laboratory at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston (which has now become the Boston Children’s Hospital). During that time period, measles was a disastrous problem: nearly every child in the United States had measles by age 15, and three to four million people were infected every year, leading to an estimated 400 to 500 deaths annually. According to the World Health Organization, measles killed an estimated 2.6 million people worldwide before the measle vaccine was developed, showing that it was a struggle not only for the U.S. but the entire world.
Katz and his team developed an inoculation, which was later tested on monkeys. He noted, “ when we put the chick virus into monkeys, they didn’t develop viremia (a virus in the blood), they didn’t develop fever, they didn’t develop any sort of nasal congestion or conjunctivitis or rash, they were perfectly fine.”
With this first success, the team tested the vaccine on students at a state school for children with neurological and central nervous system problems. “At the end of several weeks, they had antibodies to the measles virus,” Katz recalled.
Despite this development, Katz continued to work incredibly hard. He worked at different universities to lend help in different countries. For instance, Katz got letters from Nigeria asking him to expand the measles vaccine trials to Nigeria, where the measle mortality rate was as high as 15%.
Katz once said, “It is true that despite all that vaccines have done to improve the health of individuals and communities in the United States and throughout the world, they are not perfect.” However, he clarified that “one simple fact cannot reasonably be disputed—the benefits of immunizations far outweigh any possible risks.”
Sources: The New York Times, Washington Post, World Health Organization
