GRAND RAPIDS, MI – In the 1930s, as whooping cough was killing almost 6,000 American children a year, two women toiled long hours in a Grand Rapids laboratory to create a life-saving vaccine.

Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering worked on their own time and with a tiny budget and tested the vaccine on themselves. At night, they parked their car on a hill so if they needed to rush out to pick up a cough sample from a sick child, they only had to roll the car into gear.

They rallied support from local schools, parents, businesses, nurses and doctors. When they were desperate for funds, they brought Eleanor Roosevelt to their lab and begged for money.

Eventually, their efforts paid off: They created one of the first vaccines for whooping cough – and it was considered one of the best.

It’s hard to imagine what Kendrick and Eldering would think of the recent resurgence in Michigan of whooping cough – also called pertussis – and the number of parents who choose not to have their child vaccinated.

“They would be saddened,” said Carolyn Shapiro-Shapin, a Grand Valley State University history professor who has researched the development of the vaccine. “This is a really, really bad disease.”

Related: Vaccination waivers put hundreds of Michigan communities at risk of disease outbreaks

Both scientists had once suffered from whooping cough, Shapiro-Shapin said. And their research took them to countless homes of children suffering from the disease so they knew well the toll it took. The disease can cause long bouts of a choking cough, often followed by a dramatic whooping sound as the person inhales. The coughing is so intense, it often causes vomiting.

About today’s anti-vaccine movement, Kendrick and Eldering likely would wonder, “Why are these people not understanding how very real these risks are?” said Shapiro-Shapin.

Grand Rapids embraces the cause

“What’s amazing about this story is the community really came together,” Shapiro-Shapin said.

She tells the story behind the pertussis vaccine in a 2007 Michigan Historical Review article, “’A Whole Community Working Together:’ Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering and the Grand Rapids Pertussis Trials, 1932-1939".

'THE VERY BEST REWARD'

Shortly after Pearl Kendrick’s death in 1980, Dean Richard Remington wrote this tribute in the University of Michigan School of Public Health newsletter:

A life saved by prevention cannot even be identified. Who are the men and women living today who would be dead from whooping cough had it not been for Pearl Kendrick's vaccine? We can conclude with reasonable certainty that several hundred thousand of them are now leading productive lives, in this country alone. But who are they? Name one. You can't do it and neither can I.…The accomplishments of disease prevention are statistical and epidemiological. Where's the news value, the human interest in that? …

But a public service orientation can provide more than ample compensation. Dr. Kendrick never became rich and, outside a relatively small circle of informed friends and colleagues, never became famous. All she did was save hundreds of thousands of lives at modest cost. Secure knowledge of that fact is the very best reward.

SOURCE - "Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and the Pertussis Vaccine," by Carolyn Shapiro-Shapin, Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, August, 2010

Whooping cough was raging in Grand Rapids when Kendrick and Eldering began their research at the Michigan Department of Health laboratory in Grand Rapids. Kendrick, from New York, and Eldering, from Montana, were former teachers who had moved into public health, a field that offered women opportunities for careers in science.

They received permission in 1932 from the state health director to begin researching whooping cough in the state laboratory. But they still had to do their daily work - routine water and milk analyses - so the whooping cough research had to be done in the evening.

“We’d come home, feed the dogs, get some dinner and get back to what was interesting,” Eldering said in an interview, quoted by Shapiro-Shapin.

Scientists around the world were investigating a pertussis vaccine, and the Grand Rapids researchers drew on their findings in their research.

They also drew support from the local community, which had a history of strong support for public health efforts among schools, parent-teacher associations and civic groups. Community leaders already held health clinics for preschool children and summer round-ups to check for correctable conditions.

The Chamber of Commerce and government leaders also were on board.

“They wanted a healthy business climate,” Shapiro-Shapin said. “They understood that healthy people have more advantages in life - and why not give them to everyone, including the poor?

“The poor were among the first to get these vaccines, not the last.”

The scientists collected “cough plates” with the help of local physicians and the Visiting Nurse Association. They went to the homes of sick children to collect samples, often going up back stairs to small, crowded apartments that were home to families hit hard by the Depression. In addition to the physical symptoms, the illness had a significant economic toll, as parents missed work to care for sick children or because of quarantines.

With the cough plates, they began the tricky and tedious task of isolating the organism B. pertussis. Then, they had to figure out how to kill the bacillus and to process it into a vaccine.

Their first vaccines were tested on mice. And Kendrick and Eldering also tested each batch on themselves.



"They wanted to make sure that anything that went into a child was safe," Shapiro-Shapin said.

Bringing in Eleanor Roosevelt

In 1934, the scientists had a vaccine ready for a field trial. The results were dramatic. Of the 712 vaccinated children, only four suffered whooping cough, and they had mild cases. Of the 880 unvaccinated children, 45 developed the disease and “suffered its full ravages,” Shapiro-Shapin writes.

In the first two years of research, Kendrick and Eldering received only about $3,000 in funding – including $250 from local businessman and philanthropist, Ed Lowe.

In 1935, when money was running low, the women appealed to the Grand Rapids City Commission for $300 to keep the project going. They got $200.

After the success of the first trial, the researchers were cleared to expand the study, but again, funds were low. At Kendrick’s invitation, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the lab on March 9, 1936. Although Roosevelt did not provide $50,000 in annual funds that Kendrick sought, she did secure the money to add several Work Progress Administration workers to the lab’s staff.

When the expanded study began, Grand Rapids parents flocked to enroll their children in it. By 1939, more than 4,000 were involved in the research, Shapiro-Shapin said.

“There is no movement against whooping cough vaccination at this time,” she said. Instead, she described the prevailing attitude as: “These diseases kill our children. It is the Depression, and we cannot afford a sickness. Please put my child in the trial.”

At the time, many researchers tested new treatments on orphans or institutionalized children. They believed the children, by participating in a trial, were repaying their debt to society.

Kendrick and Eldering didn't go that route. Through their outreach with community groups, they received parental consent for all of the children who took part in the trials.

Making the vaccine stronger

In the early 1940s, Kendrick asked Loney Clinton Gordon, an African-American woman with a degree in chemistry, to join their research team. Gordon studied pertussis cultures and looked for virulence.

“Hundreds of organisms had been identified, even thousands, but not every organism had the same power to kill or make people sick,” she said in a 1997 interview with The Grand Rapids Press. “What we were after was a vaccination that would help to eradicate the organism."

Her vigilance and sharp eyes led to the discovery of a powerful organism that in turn led to a more effective vaccine.

The vaccine developed in Grand Rapids eventually was produced by the Michigan Health Department for the state and then distributed across the nation.

Death rates and the incidence of whooping cough plummeted. In 1934, there were 209 pertussis cases per 100,000 people in the U.S. The rate dropped to 51 in 1948 and fewer than 10 per 100,000 after 1960.

Although several other whooping cough vaccines were developed at the same time, the one produced by Eldering and Kendrick was considered “one of the best,” Shapiro-Shapin said. Kendrick traveled to Great Britain, Mexico, Eastern Europe and Central and South America to help establish vaccine programs.

Both women held leadership roles in national and international public health initiatives, but they actively avoided publicity. In the 1970s, they turned down a request to appear on the Today show.

“They were really very private people,” Shapiro-Shapin said.

However, they readily shared their findings and their knowledge with other scientists - and they shared the credit for the vaccine with the Grand Rapids community.

In the Michigan Historical Review article, Shapiro-Shapin quotes from a retrospective on the field trials written by Eldering:

“Perhaps the most interesting fact was the demonstration of what can be accomplished by a whole community working together.”

Sue Thoms covers health care for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email her at sthoms1@mlive.com or follow her on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.