Yellow fever vaccine Foundation to improve the vaccine from the "Asibi" strain, discovered that a favorable chance mutation in the attenuated virus had produced a highly efficacious strain that was named 17D. After field trials in Brazil, over one million people were vaccinated by 1939, without severe complications. For his work on the yellow fever vaccine, Theiler received the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Only the 17D vaccine remains in use today. The outbreak of yellow fever in Angola in January 2016 has raised concerns about whether the global supply of vaccine is adequate to meet the need during a large
Gertrud Theiler Africa, was named after Dr. Theiler in honor of the many years she dedicated to the collection. The argasid tick "Argas theilerae" (Hoogstraal and Kaiser, 1970), "Theiler's African white-backed vulture argasid," and the ixodid tick "Rhipicephalus gertrudae" (Feldman-Muhsam, 1960) were named to honor Dr Theiler for her many contributions to tick research. Theiler was the youngest daughter of Sir Arnold Theiler , founder and first director of the Veterinary Institute, Onderstepoort, and his wife, Emma Sophie Jegge; in 1971, she authored a biography of her father. She was a sister of virologist Max Theiler, who was awarded the 1951 Nobel