Smallpox Vaccines

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A vaccine is suspension of organisms or fractions of organisms that is used to induce immunity (Tortora, Funke & Case, 2004). In others words vaccines are products that are usually injected to the human body by needle, mouth or aerosol to produce immunity against certain diseases that are harmful to the body. Vaccines protect people from infectious diseases by reducing the risk of infection, it works with the human’s body defenses to help develop immunity. A vaccine is made of dead or weakened antigens they help develop immunity by imitating the infection. The vaccine does not cause an actual infection but the immune system recognizes it as a pathogen and produced antibodies in response. So when that particular active antigen enters the body …show more content…

The smallpox vaccine is the first vaccine to be discovered by Edward Jenner. Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had contracted a diseases called cowpox did not catch the smallpox. When he noticed that he took a fluid from cowpox blisters and scratched it on the skin of James Phipps an eight-year-old boy who only got one blister after being exposed to cowpox but recovered. Once James recovered Jenner’s inoculated him with the smallpox but he did not get it, then Jenner knew that the vaccine is successful. The vaccine is made from live vaccinia virus strain and is manufactured by using modern cell-culture techniques stocked in a lyophilized. The vaccinia vaccine helps the human body fight against the infection caused by the variola virus and also trigger robust T and B cell responses that target a wide array of viral proteins (Kennedy, et al., 2009). The vaccine can be administered through several quick puncture on the upper arm with a two-pronged needle known as bifurcate, then covered by a gauze to make sure the virus does not spread to other parts of the body or persons. The site where the vaccine was given begin to have multiple normal skin reactions similar to the stages of smallpox, this is a sign that the body is building …show more content…

There is two forms variola minor which is not lethal and variola major which produces the most severe symptoms. It mainly infects humans because due to its ability to evade the host immune responses and avoid complement activation (Graf, 2010). There are two main virulence factors the first one is a protein called SPICE that helps the virus evade detection by inactivating proteins part of the immune system called the complement system. The second one is CKBP-II which helps block immune response signals and promote inflammation at site of infection (Smallpox Fact Sheet, 2013). The initial step of the life cycle is attachment of the virus to the host cell. Once it enters the host cell it uncoat the exterior and the inner envelope virion, then the DNA uncoil along with multiple viral enzymes. This starts replication of the genome that occurs inside the cytoplasm. Once DNA is replicated to make a virion, the virion pass through cell membrane and is enveloped then released to repeat the process (Graf, 2010). The disease can only be transmitted through human to human interaction mainly by air droplets when a person is talking, coughing or sneezing because the virions are located in the mouth and nose secretion of an infected person. Unfortunately, there is no effective drug against the virus, only vaccines can prevent it. A person who has smallpox can take topical idoxuridine and cidofovir medication to manage the disease

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