Benefit versus risk factors in prophylactic vaccination against rabies.

A reliable evaluation of the universally adopted post-exposure prophylactic treatment against rabies, initiated by Louis Pasteur, became feasible only sixty years after its world-wide application. Accumulated observations and data during that period revealed that vaccines currently used for that purpose were neither safe nor dependable in inducing protection against the invariably fatal disease. Thirty years of individual and internationally collaborative research has resulted in the discovery of a new type of vaccine and the adoption of a simple treatment procedure that is now confirmed to be both safe and practically with no failure in protection of man against rabies.