Helene Sparrow

Hélène Sparrow (1958)

Hélène Sparrow (born June 5, 1891 in Bohuslaw , Kyiv Governorate , Russian Empire , † November 13, 1970 in Pietranera on Corsica ) was a Polish and French bacteriologist and microbiologist . After the First World War , she successfully fought typhus in Poland. She later developed vaccination programs against diphtheria , scarlet fever , typhus and relapsing fever in Poland and Tunisia .

Live and act

Sparrow was the daughter of Polish parents and grew up in Kiev . In 1915 she joined the Russian army as a doctor to fight the epidemics at the front. Typhus caused more deaths than weapons in World War I. After the end of the war she worked at the University Hospital of Dorpat (Estonia) and later at the Institute of Bacteriology in Kiev.

In 1920, Sparrow headed the vaccination service at the State Health Institute in Warsaw . One mission led her to fight cholera in Grodno . Afterwards she did research at the Typhus Institute of the University of Lviv from 1921 . She organized the health checks of the Poles returned from the Soviet Union .

Internships and courses led Sparrow in 1923 and 1924 at the Pasteur Institutes in Lille , Brussels and Paris and at the Institute for Hygiene in Strasbourg . This included work on tuberculosis - vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG). In 1925, at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis , she worked with Charles Nicolle , who became her mentor and three years later received the Nobel Prize in Medicine .

In Poland, Sparrow organized a vaccination campaign against scarlet fever in 1925. She was supported in this by the French pediatrician Robert Debré , who was sent by the League of Nations . With a thesis on the problems of immunization against typhus (typhoid exanthemicus) she received her doctorate 1928th Sparrow then worked as adjunct professor of bacteriology at the University of Warsaw . From 1930 to 1933 she organized the diphtheria vaccination programs in Poland.

In 1931, Sparrow went on a research trip to Mexico and Guatemala with Charles Nicolle . Two years later he brought her to his Institute Pasteur in Tunis as head of the laboratory , where she worked in research until she was seventy. Sparrow became a French citizen in 1933. There she developed the Durand Sparrow typhoid vaccine in 1940 and headed the BCG department from 1949. She also trained American and English bacteriologists.

In 1958, at the age of 67, Sparrow examined fever spots in Ethiopia for the World Health Organization (WHO) . Four years later, she retired in Corsica in 1962.

Hélène Sparrow died on November 13, 1970.

literature

• Paul Giroud : Hélène Sparrow-Germa (1891-1970). In: Bulletin de la Société de pathologie exotique. Volume 64 (1971), No. 1. pp. 13-14.

Web links

• Pasteur Institute : Hélène Sparrow chasseuse de microbes. (French)
• Pasteur Institute: Hélène Sparrow (1891-1970). (French)