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  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services | National Institutes of Health

Canyon Creek Schoolhouse Laboratory 100th Anniversary

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The best way to deal with a deadly disease is to not get sick with it. But avoiding a disease can depend on how it’s spread, where you live or what you do for a living, and the possibility for a protective vaccine.

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Control efforts

Because it was known that ticks carried RMSF, one way to eradicate the disease was to keep people from getting bitten by infected ticks. That could mean changing the way that ranchers, shepherds, woodsmen, and others did their jobs. 

There was another approach to tick control: eradicating the rodents and other small animals in an area where RMSF outbreaks occurred, often by using poison. The attempt to eradicate small animals in areas infested with RMSF failed; it wasn’t clear which animal or animals gave the infections to ticks, and new animals kept moving in.

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Cattle swim through a concrete trough directly toward viewer

To protect the workers most in contact with animals that could harbor ticks, Dr. Robert Cooley, the Montana State Entomologist and head Entomologist at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory, recommended dipping livestock in disinfectants to kill the ticks, as was being done in this photo.

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Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1520

Developing a Vaccine

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Developing a Vaccine

One of the surest ways to stop the spread of a disease is to develop a vaccine against it. At the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory, bacteriologists (Dr. Roscoe Spencer) and entomologists (Dr. Ralph Parker) worked together to that end. Despite the limited technology and understanding of bacteriology of the 1920s, once Spencer and Parker began to work together in 1921, a vaccine was developed in less than three years.

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Two men wear white coats working together at wood table with guinea pig cages behind them. They are handling the animals.

As illustrated by this photo of two RMSF researchers, the development of a RMSF vaccine was only possible because of cooperation between state and federal agencies, scientific disciplines, and the research staff.

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Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1114

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Spencer took Lot 2351-B in a pillbox to the Hygienic Laboratory (precursor to the NIH) in Washington, D.C. to test them. These ticks were known to carry RMSF. After they were warmed up to get the pathogen active, they were fed on infected guinea pigs, so that they had been exposed to RMSF two times. They proved to be particularly virulent after they were fed, with more infectious material per weight than guinea pigs could produce.

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A man works at a desk in the animal area with a rack of cages covered in white cloth and a rack of uncovered cages.

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Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1490-1

Spencer had discovered that ticks were “a more efficient culture media than the guinea pig” if they went through incubation and feeding first.


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It was from a pan full of engorged, doubly-infected ticks like the one shown here that Spencer decided to try to make a vaccine by grinding the ticks with phenol (also known as carbolic acid, a strong disinfectant). He injected the ground-up ticks into healthy guinea pigs to vaccinate them. Then he infected both the vaccinated guinea pigs and unvaccinated guinea pigs with RMSF; the vaccinated guinea pigs did not get sick, while unvaccinated ones died.

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A white enameled pan of engorged ticks

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Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1465-1

“The feasibility of human vaccination also naturally arises,” he wrote in his 1924 paper describing these studies. And he adds that he tried the vaccine on one human, with no ill effects. The human was himself.

This bottle of Rocky Mountain spotted fever vaccine from the early 1940s represents much scientific work and practical experimentation. There were no strict research protocols for vaccine development and testing in the early 19th century. There was no oversight or approvals from the Food and Drug Administration. The Hygienic Laboratory (NIH’s precursor) had regulatory authority, testing commercial vaccines for safety and effectiveness. Spencer worked at the Hygienic Laboratory and was certainly familiar with the tests required to prove that a vaccine worked safely and at what dose it should be given, as well as the standards for producing a safe vaccine. He knew proving that his RMSF vaccine worked would take more than inoculating himself with it.

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12. Bottle the vaccine in a sterile environment as this worker is doing in this 1931 photo.

The dosage is difficult to determine, but “Such irregularities are not surprising, however, when we recall that so little is known of the various factors affecting the process and mechanism of immunity.”

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A woman bottles vaccine under a glass enclosure. She wears an apron but no protective gloves or mask.

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Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1523-sl

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