Smallpox: Eradicating the Scourge

Page 2 of 6

• 1. The scourge of the world
• 2. Edward Jenner's breakthrough
• 3. Draconian measures in Yugoslavia
• 4. Containment
• 5. A new threat?
• 6. Find out more
• Print entire article

Edward Jenner's breakthrough

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is credited with introducing variolation to Britain in 1721. Severely pockmarked herself after surviving the illness, she learnt about variolation in Constantinople, where her husband was the British Ambassador. She had her children inoculated and persuaded the Princess of Wales to do the same.

The real breakthrough in fighting the virus came in 1796, when Edward Jenner carried out his famous experiment. He inserted pus extracted from a cowpox pustule on the hand of a milkmaid, into an incision on the arm of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps. Jenner was testing his theory, drawn from the folklore of the countryside, that milkmaids who suffered the mild disease of cowpox never contracted smallpox. Jenner proved conclusively that contracting cowpox provided immunity against smallpox as well. He was quick to realise the enormous potential of vaccination. In 1801 he wrote 'It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.'

It was to be well over a hundred years before Jenner's vision finally began to be realised. In 1959 the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to undertake the global eradication of smallpox. The goal of eradication made sense to the developed countries in Europe and North America. Although vaccination had largely wiped out the disease from these areas, they all continued to suffer outbreaks of smallpox caused by imports from developing countries where the disease was endemic.

There were a number of outbreaks that demonstrated how a few smallpox cases could spark mass panic and large-scale disruption. In 1947 a Mexican businessman, unaware he was incubating smallpox, travelled by bus to New York. Worried that a smallpox epidemic would spiral out of control in the densely populated city, the health authorities decided to act pre-emptively and mass vaccinate New Yorkers. Over six million people were vaccinated within a month at hundreds of vaccination stations in hospitals, firehouses, and police stations. In all, 12 people caught smallpox and two of them, including the Mexican, died. Ironically six people also died from adverse reactions to the vaccine.

NextPrevious

Published: 2002-02-01