Raiva de laboratório: acidente pós-vacinal ocorrido em Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil

Abstract

An acute and lethal encephalomyelitis outbreak took place in Fortaleza, State of Ceará, Brazil, from November 11 to 24 of 1960, in people bitten by dogs, who had been submitted, almost immediately after the bite, to a preventive antirabies treatment

The vaccine in use had been prepared in Fortaleza, according to Fermi's technique, by the Laboratory of the local Public Health Service, with rabies fixed virus from the brain of intracerebrally inoculated sheep. The vaccine had not been adequately submitted to the potency and safety tests normally required for an inactivated virus vaccine

There was a total of 18 fatal encephalomyelitis cases within a group of 66 persons who had been inoculated with one or more doses of the vaccine suspected as the cause of the outbreak, on the basis of its clinical and epidemiological features

The average period of incubatin, reckoned from the first dose of vaccine, was of 8 days

Only for 5 out of the 18 cases was it proven that the biting dog was actually rabid. In another 6 cases with unknown history of the biting dogs the animals were listed as suspects, and in the 7 remaining cases the dogs involved remained healthy

CNS material collected from three human cases, kept partly in glycerol and partly in formalin, as well as the suspect vaccine in the original vials, were submitted to examination. The rabbit-passage strain of the fixed virus and the sheep-brain...(AU)