Merieux, Charles

▪ 2002

      French virologist (b. Jan. 9, 1907, Lyon, France—d. Jan. 18, 2001, Lyon), devised an efficient industrial technique for mass producing vaccines to fight such human and veterinary viruses as those for polio, rabies, meningitis, diphtheria, tetanus, and foot-and-mouth disease. During World War II he expanded operations at the microbiological laboratory set up by his father, a protégé of Louis Pasteur, distributing blood plasma to members of the Resistance and a serum to help malnourished children. In 1947 Mérieux founded the French Institute of Foot-and-Mouth Disease (later renamed the Mérieux Institute), which fought an outbreak of that virus in the 1960s and stopped a 1974 outbreak of meningitis in Brazil by producing enough vaccine to inoculate some 90 million people. The Mériuex Institute later formed joint ventures with the Pasteur Institute and the pharmaceutical company Rhône-Poulenc. Mérieux also established foundations to train public health technicians, an epidemiological teaching centre, and a laboratory in Lyon to study hemorrhagic fever.

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