Abstract
THE reports of the Haffkine Institute for 1938 and of the Pasteur Institute of India, Kasauli, for 1937, have reached us. The Haffkine Institute is the centre for the preparation of Haffkine's preventive plague vaccine, of which 1,137,086 doses were issued during the year. Some trials of the Institute's antiplague serum were made in a small outbreak of plague, with a mortality of about 26 per cent, compared with a mortality of about 63 per cent with other nonspecific treatments. Two of the sulphanilamide drugs, Prontosil and M. and B. 693, so valuable in streptococcal infections, were tried in plague but showed little or no curative power. A number of research studies on plague vaccine and serum, anti-malaria drugs, human and rat leprosy, fleas, and other subjects are summarized. At the Kasauli Pasteur Institute, anti-rabic treatment is carried out. The total number of patients attending the Institute and its centres was 28,076, of whom 20,936 received the full course of antirabic treatment, with a mortality of 0·45 per cent. The vaccine employed was a carbolized 5 per cent emulsion of brain of sheep inoculated with Paris fixed virus. The deaths from rabies registered in 1937 in the Punjab and the United Provinces numbered 438.
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Work of Indian Medical Institutes. Nature 144, 506–507 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144506d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144506d0