The year is 1796. The smallpox epidemic has killed approximately 5 million people in just Europe alone (Murphy). One in every seven children will become infected with and die of smallpox. It seems as though this epidemic is unstoppable, but later a man named Edward Jenner will create a new method to fight smallpox. Jenner will remove a blister from one of the infected, and inject it into the arm of another person (Riedel). He will call his new method ‘arm to arm inoculation’. Jenner’s method proved to be revolutionary. Once a person had been exposed to smallpox, their body would begin to produce antibodies capable of fighting the disease, helping them survive if they ever were to contract real smallpox. Jenner’s new method was genius, and created the model for the modern day vaccination. Arm-to-arm inoculation has eradicated diseases such as smallpox, polio and many others. Despite this, …show more content…
More children would be healthy and less at risk for disease throughout their life. New vaccination laws would benefit everyone. Should vaccination rates continue to decrease, America will begin to see a rise in once eliminated infectious diseases. Those with weak immune systems, such as newborn babies, the elderly and the sick will become infected with Rubella, young children will once again die from polio, and overall life expectancy will decrease. This will be our new reality unless immediate action is taken. We have a duty to protect the future of our country, but how are we supposed to do that if children can’t survive until adulthood? The laws must be changed, and they must be changed quickly. Public health and the safety of children must come first. As Jeffrey Kluger once said, “Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them.” As a country, we must push beyond fear, and ensure our futures are safe, and that we are doing all we can to protect the nation's
This summer we had an opportunity to dive into the world of bioweapons, through Richard Preston’s novel The Demon in the Freezer. His book explored the colorful world of smallpox and its use as a biological weapon. Earlier this week we were graced with this authors present for an ACES event. He discussed some of the found topics in his book such as animal testing, what small pox is, and even its eradication. One of the great things we had the chance of vocalizing were our many opinions on the gloom associated with this intriguing disease.
“Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed and by you extirpated”. This quote comes from Thomas Jefferson to Edward Jenner, he founder of the smallpox vaccine. It would only be 100 years later that Jefferson would see his dream fulfilled, but not without struggle. In House on Fire, author William H. Foege shares his first hand view of the lengths that society needed to go through to rid the world of the disease that had plagued it for so long. The story of the fight against smallpox extends long before our efforts for global eradication and is a representation of how society deals with widespread disease. House on
The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston is an intriguing book that discusses the anthrax terrorist attacks after 9/11 and how smallpox might become a future bioterrorist threat to the world. The book provides a brief history of the smallpox disease including details of an outbreak in Germany in 1970. The disease was eradicated in 1979 due to the World Health Organization’s aggressive vaccine program. After the virus was no longer a treat the World Health Organization discontinued recommending the smallpox vaccination. In conjunction, inventory of the vaccine was decreased to save money. The virus was locked up in two labs, one in the United States and one in Russia. However, some feel the smallpox virus exists elsewhere. Dr. Peter Jahrling and a team of scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland became concerned terrorists had access to the smallpox virus and planed to alter the strain to become more resistant. These doctors conducted smallpox experiments to discover more effective vaccines in case the virus were released. Preparedness for a major epidemic is discussed as well as the ease with which smallpox can be bioengineered.
One similarity between smallpox and the black death was that they both established new trade with countries they had rarely traded with before. With smallpox, the Americas were faced with a labour shortage due to the amount of people smallpox had killed. The labour was needed to work in silver mines and sugar plantations.To fill the shortage of labour, slaves were traded from the Guinea Coast, somewhere there was not much trade in before, but now was a bustling center of trade due to the demand for slaves. Similarly, during the black death, there was a shortage of people because of the shrunken population. There were less people buying wool, wine, and cheese, so merchants from Europe sook out customers in different areas. Some such areas were
... risk of developing the disease. It was observed that those who had been infected with the clinically similar but less severe cowpox disease by milking cows were also immune to smallpox. This observation led Edward Jenner to his first ever vaccination technique. He inserted the cowpox virus obtained from the scabs of a woman into a boy, and then when the boy was inoculated some time later, he proved immune to smallpox (Fenner). It is impossible to contract smallpox from this inoculation of the less virulent related virus and allowed individuals a way to protect themselves without risk. Later, the smallpox vaccination was adapted by using a different live virus, the vaccinia virus which is more similar to variola than cowpox and therefore provides better cross-immunity. As the practice of vaccination gained popularity, it had a significant impact on life expectancy.
The perspective the author gives to this book is a unique. Smallpox according to most histories does not play the role of a major character, but a minor part. In my opinion smallpox was a major factor during the Revolutionary War, and Feen focuses on several key areas which allows us to see just how bad this epidemic was and the grip it had not only on the soldiers, but the colonist as well.
Transportation and migration has been important to Homo sapiens since the time of the hunter-gatherer. Humans have used the different methods of transportation since this time for a number of reasons (i.e. survival in the case of the hunter-gatherer, to spread religion, or in order to search for precious minerals and spices). What few of these human travelers failed to realize is that often diseases were migrating with them. This essay will look at the spread of the disease smallpox. In the following I hope to reveal the history of smallpox as well as why it devastated the New World.
Loo, Yueh-Ming and Michael Gale, Jr. “Influenza: Fatal Immunity and the 1918 Virus.” Nature 445 (2007): 267-268. 23 July. 2008 .
By preserving the virus, Boylston personally inoculated 247 people in 1721 and 1722 to prevent transmission. However, from there only six people died, and Boylston was the first American surgeon to inoculate his patients personally. The author portrays the background data Boylston used to examine the inoculation practice on different age and gender of persons to treat his patients from previous experiments. The inoculation method provided higher level of immunity in preventing smallpox infection. The prevention of smallpox is through inducing antibodies through vaccines which last longer for a person taking it.
Although the Columbian Exchange allowed for the beneficial exchange of cultures, ideas, foods, and animals around the world during the 1450-1750 time period, it also had a dark side. One detrimental result of the Columbian Exchange would be the spreading of smallpox from Europe to the New World.
... you wait, the more likely your child’s immune system will be able to handle the onslaught with minimal damage” (Sarah). I am not suggesting that we return to the days without vaccines. But we must seriously address what appears to be an obvious link between the epidemic of developmental delays, autoimmune diseases, and the increasing number of mandatory vaccines. Every parent should know the advantages as well as the dangers associated with each and every vaccine, each and every time it is given. They should know the positive and negative consequences of refusing that their children be vaccinated, and be made aware of how they can go about getting exemptions. Also-- the government, industry, health-care professionals, and parents must band together to get the research needed to determine the safety of these vaccines. The stakes are too high for us to do otherwise.
The history of vaccinations does not begin with the first vaccination itself but rather an infectious disease that had greatly affected the human population. In 1796 Edward Jenner created a successful composition using cowpox material that created immunity to the ongoing growth of the small pox disease. Jenner’s method underwent 200 years of medical and technological changes until it had finally resulted in complete elimination of the smallpox disease. Vaccinations have been a controversial medical topic for many years and although it is proven to be an effective means of preventing serious effects, including fatalities from childhood illnesses the controversy remains that the side effects from the immunizations outweigh the risk of contracting the disease. According to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia they state that “innovative techniques now drive vaccine research, with recombinant DNA technology and new delivery techniques leading scientist in new directions. Disease targets have expanded, and some vaccine research is beginning to focus on non-infectious conditions, such as addictions and allergies” (“The History of Vaccines” College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Web. 10 January. 2014). While public health officials insist that vaccines are the best way to protect public health. Over the past thirty years the vaccination schedule has tripled and since then there has been an alarming rise in the infant mortality rate in America. The problem is not the vaccination itself, but the quality of the vaccination.
Edward Jenner invented a method to protect against smallpox in the late 1700s. The method involved taking substances from an open wound of someone with small-pox or cow-pox and injecting it into another person’s skin, also called “arm-to-arm inoculation”. The earliest actual documented examples of vaccination date all the way back to the tenth century in China (Lombard, “A brief history of vaccines and vaccinations”). The mention of early vaccination was taken note of by a French scholar, Henri Husson, written in one of his journals (Dictionaire des sciences médicale). The Ottoman Empire Turks also discovered a method of immunization a few centuries later. Lady Montagu of Great Britain, a famous writer and wife of the English ambassador of Istanbul, between 1716 -1718, came across the Turkish vaccine for small-pox. After surviving as a child with small-pox, she insisted her son be vaccinated (Henricy, “Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Wortley Montagu”). When she returned to England, she continued to publicize the Turkish tradition of immunization and spread their methods to the rest of her country. She also had all family members also vaccinated. Immunization was soon adopted in England, nearly 50 years before Jenner's smallpox vaccine in 1796 (Sharp, “Anti-vaccinationists past and present”). Edward Jenner’s target for smallpox was to eradicate it. And later by the 1940s, knowledge of the science behind vaccines had developed and soon reached the point where across-the-board vaccine production was a goal that was possible and where serious disease control efforts could start. Vaccines for many dangerous diseases, including ones protecting against pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus were underway into production. ...
Vaccines have been around for hundreds of years starting in 1796 when Edward Jenner created the first smallpox vaccine. Jenner, an English country doctor noticed cowpox, which were blisters forming on the female cow utters. Jenner then took fluid from the cow blister and scratched it into an eight-year-old boy. A single blister came up were the boy had been scratched but it quickly recovered. After this experiment, Jenner injected the boy with smallpox matter. No disease arose, the vaccine was a success. Doctors all around Europe soon began to proceed in Jenner’s method. Seven different vaccines came from the single experimental smallpox vaccine. Now the questions were on the horizon. Should everyone be getting vaccinations? Where’s the safety limit? How can they be improved? These questions needed answers, and with a couple hundred years later with all the technology, we would have them(ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).
Illness has been a major part of humankind’s lives almost since the beginning of time. Throughout history, illnesses caused fatal epidemics that caused deaths between young and old, and brought fear upon all for the absence of a cure. Having an illness throughout most of history was considered an inevitable death sentence, as the majority of causes of death (Offit). Vaccinations have been experimented in China and Turkey in the 15th century, with methods such as inhaling or rubbing grounded up smallpox scabs against open cuts (Clem). Then in 1700s, the first form of modern vaccination was invented by Edward Jenner with the cowpox virus acting against smallpox, giving immunity against it (Offit).