Vaccines and Their Production

Abstract

One of the greatest contributions of modern medicine for humanity is the development of vaccine which is a cost-effective and powerful prophylactic measure to protect against deadly diseases. The discovery of vaccine and immunisation began with Edward Jenner, an English practitioner living in Berkley, England, who performed the world’s first vaccination in 1796. Edward Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy, James Phipps, with a cowpox lesion on a milkmaid’s hand and later with smallpox, and the boy was unaffected by this and subsequent exposures. Louis Pasteur in 1885 developed a rabies vaccine which basically comprised of rabies antitoxin that functioned as a postinfection antidote. Subsequently, a variety of vaccines were developed and used for the prevention of disease against a variety of bacterial, viral and parasitic organisms.