vaccine was available in the United States for adults in 1993 at high risk of contracting the plague until removal from the market by the Food and Drug Administration. It was of limited effectiveness and could cause severe inflammation. Experiments with genetic engineering of a vaccine based on F1 and V antigens are underway and show promise. However, bacteria lacking antigen F1 are still virulent, and the V antigens are sufficiently variable such that vaccines composed of these antigens may not be fully protective. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases has found that an experimental F1/V antigen-based vaccine protects crab-eating macaques, but fails to protect African green monkey species. A systematic review by the Cochrane Collaboration found no studies of sufficient quality to make any statement on the efficacy of the vaccine. Isolation and identification In 1894, two bacteriologists, Alexandre Yersin of Switzerland and Kitasato Shibasaburō of Japan, independently isolated in Hong Kong the bacterium responsible for the 1894 Hong Kong plague. Though both investigators reported their findings, a series of confusing and contradictory statements by Kitasato eventually led to the acceptance of Yersin as the primary discoverer of the organism. Yersin named it Pasteurella pestis in honor of the Pasteur Institute, where he worked. In 1967, it was moved to a new genus and renamed Yersinia pestis in his honor. Yersin also noted that rats were affected by plague not only during plague epidemics, but also often preceding such epidemics in humans and that plague was regarded by many locals as a disease of rats; villagers in China and India asserted that when large numbers of rats were found dead, plague outbreaks soon followed. In 1898, French scientist Paul-Louis Simond (who had also come to China to battle the Third Pandemic) discovered the rat–flea vector that drives the disease. He had noted that persons who became ill did not have to be in close contact with each other to acquire the disease. In Yunnan, China, inhabitants would flee from their homes as soon as they saw dead rats, and on the island of Formosa (Taiwan), residents considered the handling of dead rats heightened the risks of developing plague. These observations led him to suspect that the flea might be an intermediary factor in the transmission of plague, since people acquired plague only if they were in contact with rats that had died less than 24