Long before COVID-19, tuberculosis was killing millions of people around the world until a vaccine was discovered at the Pasteur Institute. The Dright Armand Frappier was the first to use it extensively in Canada, particularly among the Aborigines.
After a long journey by train, seaplane and canoe, Dr. Armand Frappier in July 1946 with a Federal Service of Indian Affairs delegate and an interpreter to the Crees of Waswanipi to address tuberculosis.
He himself vaccinated 70 members of the Cree community that summer, who, like most of the country’s native nations, have been decimated by the lung disease nicknamed the “white plague.”
This trip to northern Quebec will serve as a dress rehearsal for a coast-to-coast campaign the microbiologist will then launch.
The archives of the institute that bears his name in Laval have kept the registers of the anti-tuberculosis campaign that will stretch from Labrador to British Columbia. In three years, almost 10,000 doses of the BCG vaccine (for Bacillus Guillemette-Guérin, named after the inventors) will be given to Aboriginal people in Canada.
Photo from the Institut Armand-Frappier collection.
dr Armand Frappier has conducted several vaccination campaigns against tuberculosis. We see him here with the Mistassini Crees in 1948.
Bernadette’s death
“The death of my mother from tuberculosis at the age of 40 marked the beginning of my career,” the doctor explains in an audio document preserved in the archives of the University of Montreal.
All families in his hometown of Salaberry-de-Valleyfield were affected by the epidemic, he recalls. By the 1930s, as many as 3,300 people were dying of this disease in Quebec every year.
Her mother left behind eight children and a desperate husband. Young Armand, 19, had promised that day to devote himself to fighting infectious diseases, which led him to study with one of the inventors of the French vaccine, Camille Guérin.
He brought the strain of the bacillus himself in a suitcase with the intention of producing it for Quebec and Canada. But vaccination of the drug is very controversial.
“Criminal! »
In the 1930s, the medical community, particularly in English Canada, questioned the effectiveness of BCG. The opposition movement is led by some of the biggest names in American medicine. A McGill University professor calls Dr. Frappier even a criminal.
Vaccination against tuberculosis will remain largely domestically focused. Between 1926 and 1984, three quarters of Canada’s tuberculosis vaccines were distributed in Quebec (3.4 million out of 4.1 million).
Impossible to know how many lives were saved by the Valleyfield doctor’s interventions. It must be said that the contagion was caused by poor sanitary conditions. When we tackled it, the epidemic slowed down.
Massive vaccination campaigns would fade away by the 1960s.
dr Frappier was content to have seen tuberculosis recede by the end of his life. In fact, it almost disappeared for several years before reappearing in the shadow of COVID-19.
Sources:
- Armand Frappier, A Dream, a Struggle, Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1992, Alain Stanké and Jean-Louis Morgan.
- This never-ending struggle, Montreal, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 1970, 269 pp.
- MR Sauvé, “Armand Frappier, the man who saved lives”, Graduates, 2017.
Who was Armand Frappier?
Photo from the Institut Armand-Frappier collection
Armand Frappier in the laboratories of the Department of Microbiology and Hygiene at the University of Montreal.
- Born 1904 in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield
- He studied medicine, then bacteriology at the University of Montreal
- In 1931 he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to hone his skills in the United States and France.
- At the Pasteur Institute in Paris, he became familiar with the BCG vaccine, which he would bring back to distribute in Canada.
- He married Thérèse Ostiguy in 1929. The couple have four children: Lise, Monique, Michèle and Paul.
- Established 1938 University of Montreal Institute of Microbiology and Hygiene.
- [In1945hefoundedtheworld’slargestFrench-languageuniversityschoolforhygiene[1945gründeteerdieweltweiterstefranzösischsprachigeUniversitätsschulefürHygiene
- The Institute moved to Laval in 1963.
- In 1974 he retired.
- He died in 1991 at the age of 87.
- The Armand Frappier Prize was established in 1993 to honor the doctor’s memory. It is awarded annually to “an individual pursuing a career in research and contributing to the development of a research institution or to the management or promotion of research”.
Source: inrs.ca/linrs/histoire/leffort-de-guerre-darmand-frappier