Symptoms of inhalation anthrax can begin as early as 24 hours after breathing the spores. Vaccines prevent illness by stimulating the body's natural disease-fighting abilities. They are among the most powerful tools developed by modern medicine for keeping people healthy. Vaccines are routinely used in the United States to protect against disease such as mumps, measles, whooping cough, and polio. As part of medical protection, personnel are given additional vaccines to protect against naturally occurring disease encountered when overseas, such as typhoid, hepatitis, and yellow fever.
Vaccines also help protect against biological weapons.
The Department Defense has established a vaccination program to protect personnel against anthrax. Anthrax vaccine is a sterile product made from filtrates of cultures of a strain of the anthrax organism that does not cause disease. The vaccine contains no living or dead anthrax organisms. The anthrax vaccine is not new. Human anthrax vaccines were developed in England and the U.S. in the 1950s and early 1960s.