The development of new vaccines against Bacillus anthracis

The disease anthrax is caused by a bacterium, Bacillus anthracis. Although primarily a disease of animals it can also infect man, sometimes with fatal consequences. Recent interest in the organism has centred on its ability to be employed as a biological weapon; the organism forms heat resistant spores which are easy to produce using commercially available technology and can infect humans via the aerosol route. At the time of the Gulf War it was reported that Iraq had produced and weaponized large quantities of anthrax spores (Zilinska 1997; www.anthrax.osd.mil/). As a consequence of this raised pro®le a considerable amount of effort has been focused on the development of new therapies that will meet the standards of the 21st century. Vaccination is the most cost-effective form of mass protection. While the ®rst anthrax animal vaccine was developed by Pasteur in 1881, human vaccines did not emerge until the middle of the 20th century. The vaccines currently available provide effective protection but suffer from problems of standardization, are relatively expensive to produce, require repeated dosing and have been associated with transient side-effects. This paper will give a brief overview of the organism, its pathogenicity and the efforts being made to develop new vaccines.