• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 287 0

and error. In the late 1700s, the British physician Edward Jenner invented a safer smallpox vaccine based on stories he heard about how milkmaids never got smallpox. Cows can get infected with cowpox, a close relative of smallpox, and so Jenner wondered if it provided some protection. He took pus from the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated it into the arm of a boy. The boy developed a few small pustules, but otherwise he suffered no symptoms. Six weeks later, Jenner variolated the boy—in other words, he exposed the boy to smallpox, rather than cowpox. The boy developed no pustules at all. Jenner published a pamphlet in 1798 documenting this new, safer way to prevent smallpox. He dubbed it “vaccination,” after the Latin name of cowpox, Variolae vaccinae. Within three years, over one hundred thousand people in England had gotten vaccinated against smallpox, and vaccinations spread around the world. In later years, other scientists borrowed Jenner’s techniques and invented vaccines for other viruses. From rumors about milkmaids came a medical revolution.

As vaccines grew popular, doctors struggled to keep up with the demand. At first they would pick off the scabs that formed on vaccinated arms, and use them to vaccinate others in turn. But since cowpox occurred naturally only in Europe, people in other parts of the world could not simply acquire the virus themselves. In 1803, King Carlos of Spain came up with a radical solution: a vaccine expedition to the Americas and Asia. Twenty orphans boarded a ship in Spain. One of the orphans had been vaccinated before the ship set sail. After eight days, the orphan developed pustules, and then scabs. Those scabs were used to vaccinate another orphan, and so on through a chain of vaccination. As the ship stopped in port after port, the expedition delivered scabs to vaccinate the local population.

Physicians struggled throughout the 1800s to find a better way to deliver smallpox vaccines. Some turned calves into vaccine factories, infecting them repeatedly with cowpox. Some experimented with preserving the scabs in fluids like glycerol. It wasn’t until scientists finally worked out the nature of smallpox and cowpox—the fact that they were viruses—that it became possible to develop a vaccine that could be made on an industrial scale and shipped around the world.

Once vaccines became common, smallpox began to lose its fierce grip on humanity. Through the early 1900s, one country after another recorded their last case of smallpox. By 1959, smallpox had retreated from Europe, the Soviet Union, and North America. It remained a scourge of tropical countries with poor medical systems in place. But it was beaten so far back that some public health workers began to contemplate an audacious goal: eliminating smallpox from the planet altogether.

The advocates of smallpox eradication built their case on the biology of the virus. Smallpox only infects humans, not animals. If it could be systematically eliminated from every human population, there would be no need to worry that it was lurking in pigs or ducks, waiting to reinfect us. What’s more, smallpox is an obvious disease. Unlike a virus like HIV, which can take years to make itself known, smallpox declares its gruesome presence in a matter of days. Public health workers would be able to identify outbreaks and track them with great precision.

Yet the idea of eradicating smallpox met with intense skepticism. If everything went exactly according to plan, an eradication project would require years of labor by thousands of trained workers, spread across much of the world, toiling in many remote, dangerous place. Public health workers had already tried to eradicate other diseases, like malaria, and failed.

The skeptics lost the debate, however, and in 1965, the World Health Organization launched the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme. The eradication effort was different in many ways from previous campaigns. It relied on a new prong-shaped needle that could deliver smallpox vaccine far more efficiently than