Vaccine Therapy

Vaccine Therapy 

a method of treating certain infectious diseases by administering vaccines. Vaccine therapy is based on I. I. Mechnikov’s teaching on phagocytosis. The repeated injection of vaccine (at certain intervals of time, in certain doses, and a certain number of times) lowers the body’s sensitivity to a specific antigen (causative agent) and causes what is called desensitization. It also intensifies the phagocytosis of the specific causative agent and stimulates the metabolic processes. In the primary focus, it increases hyperemia and the permeability of blood vessels. Autovaccines are used for diseases caused by streptococci and staphylococci and for some other diseases. Killed vaccines are ordinarily used for the vaccine therapy of man; they may be injected subcutaneously, intramuscularly, intradermally, or intravenously. (Sometimes the different methods are combined.) The administration of vaccine often elicits a severe systemic reaction—chills, elevated temperature, increased perspiration, and intensification of pain. (The therapeutic effect sets in later.) Vaccine therapy is contraindicated in the second half of pregnancy, active tuberculosis, cardiac diseases in the stage of decompensation, kidney disorders, severe atherosclerosis, hypertension, and some other diseases.

Veterinarians resort to vaccine therapy comparatively rarely; they use vaccine therapy chiefly to treat protracted, chronic, localized infectious diseases, such as brucellosis, tularemia, colibacteriosis, and staphylococcal infections by stimulating antibody formation. Vaccines made from killed microbes, anavaccines, toxoids, antiviruses, ly sates of microbial cells, autovaccines, and bacteriophages are used for vaccine therapy.