ABSTRACT
Rabies and vesicular stomatitis virus are the only two members of the rhabdovirus group responsible for both human and animal disease. In 1884 Pasteur et al. reported that the virulence of rabies virus could be modified by successive passage of virus in monkeys, and that such an attenuated virus could make dogs refractory to infection with fully virulent virus. Inactivation of virus-infected brain tissue by phenol was proposed by C. Fermi. Rage de Laboratoire—Rage de Laboratoire is a disease provoked by the living "fixed rabies virus" present in the vaccine. The solution to the problems of safety of rabies vaccine evidently lay in the development of vaccines prepared from rabies virus grown in tissue culture free of neural tissue. Hamster kidney rabies vaccine has been thoroughly investigated since the early work done by Kissling. The first vaccine used for mass vaccination of dogs was a modified Semple type prepared by Umeno and Doi in Tokyo.
