Page 33 - VHSA - Onderstepoort 100 Years - Part 1

ONDERSTEPOORT 100
in Parliament and reprimands by the responsible Minister. This time the solution was thought to lie in the urgent importation of vaccine from Australia. An order for 0,9 million doses was placed for the 6 months from July 1950
to January 1951 but only 329 000 were delivered. In February 1951 another 0,5 million had to be ordered by airfreight and 1 million by sea. By then the outbreak was under control and the production facilities had been enlarged. Ever since, this vaccine has remained the top-selling product of Onderstepoort.
Several other diseases caused concern
in 1950. In October Newcastle disease
in chickens was reported and brought
under control with a live viral vaccine
produced in Cape Town. Outbreaks of
malignant catarrhal fever in cattle occurred
in various parts of the country and a
scientific breakthrough was made when de Kock and Neitz demonstrated that, in South Africa, sheep could also serve as reservoirs of a virus causing the disease in cattle. The recurrence of sheep scab (brandsiekte) in sheep, which was thought to have been eradicated in the 1930s, was also a cause for concern. Fortunately it was soon found that the mite which causes the disease could be controlled effectively with gamma BHC. Of considerable economic importance was the development of an improved method for the production of C and D botulinum toxins for vaccine production purposes by Sterne and co-workers. This consisted of growing the bacterial strains individually in a semi-permeable membrane ‘sausage’ immersed in culture medium, allowing the removal of toxic metabolic products by dia-
lysis and resulting in a much higher
concentration of the toxins which
were subsequently inactivated to
form the vaccine. Another method
is used these days for production of
lamsiekte vaccine (see also Part 3:
Bacteriology). Rift Valley fever (RVF),
which had been described for the
first time in 1931 in Kenya, was first
diagnosed in South Africa during
the 1950/51 summer season and an
effective vaccine was produced in
mouse brains using an attenuated
Kenyan strain of the virus causing the
disease. Finally, a successful vaccine
against fowl pox was developed by
Max Theiler, son of Onderstepoort’s founder, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1951 for his work carried out in the USA, as a staff member of the Rockefeller Institute, on yellow fever in humans
attenuation and cultivation of the virus in embryonated eggs.
“1951 saw two happy occasions: the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine to Max Theiler for research on yellow fever in humans, and the election of
R. du Toit as a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on parasitic diseases.”
1951 also saw two happy occasions. The first was the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine to Max Theiler, son of Onderstepoort’s founder, for his research on yellow fever in humans carried out in the USA as a staff member of the Rockefeller Institute. The second was the election of R. du Toit as a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on parasitic diseases. Less happy was the transfer of some of the rumen physiology research activity, initiated in the 1930s by Quin, to the CSIR under G.F.M.C. (Fanny) Gilchrist. A CSIR unit remained at Onderstepoort and close collaboration between the Onderstepoort and CSIR units
persisted for many years.
During the 1950s virus research gra-
dually became the dominant activity at Onderstepoort. This was mainly the result of vast improvements in the technology of isolating and cultivating viruses which triggered a similar transition worldwide. The new techniques included passage in new-born mouse brains, of which Max Theiler was one of the pioneers, and cultivation in embryonated eggs and eventually in cell cultures. In order to keep up with these global tendencies a new virology building was erected, providing extensive facilities for large-scale tissue and cell culture production. As a virologist, Alexander remained intimately involved in virus research and was, inter alia, res- ponsible for the identification of bluetongue virus in specimens received from Israel in 1952 and for the first diagnosis of
33
Post-war recovery (1948-1961)
1908-2008
Years