UCF professor Henry Daniell and his team have developed an oral vaccine that early research shows is highly effective against the Black Plague, a disease that wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages and that federal government agencies perceive as a terrorist threat today.
Findings of his National Institutes of Health and United States Department of Agriculture funded research appears in the August edition of Infection and Immunity. In the event of a bioterror attack, the oral form makes the vaccine practical, as the distribution of pills would be much quicker and likely more effective because no special skills or sterile needles are needed to administer them. “It’s expensive to create an injectable vaccine. But with oral vaccines, it is quite cheap,” Daniell said.
For more information about the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences.