Initial symptoms include fever, cough, and weakness. These ultimately progress to breathing problems, shock, and death. Vaccines prevent illness by stimulating the body's natural disease-fighting abilities. They are among the most powerful tools developed by modern medicine to keep people healthy. Vaccines are used routinely in the United States to protect against diseases like tetanus, mumps, measles, whooping cough, and polio.
Vaccines also help protect against biological weapons like anthrax.
As part of Force Health Protection, DoD and Coast Guard personnel are given additional vaccines to provide maximum protection against naturally occurring diseases encountered when deploying overseas, such as typhoid, hepatitis A, and yellow fever. The vaccine contains no living or dead anthrax organisms. Vaccination produces antibodies that neutralize the disease-causing protein common to every strain of anthrax. The anthrax vaccine is not new. Human anthrax vaccines were developed in England and the U.S. in the 1950s and early 1960s.