RangerJoe
Posts: 13450
Joined: 11/16/2015
From: My Mother, although my Father had some small part.
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lobster
Smallpox was first seen in Egyptian mummies. It was with humanity for centuries. The death rate was 30%. In 1/3 of the survivors it resulted in blindness. It likely jumped to humans from cattle. It was noticed that milkmaids did not get the disease. I can't recall the persons name but he used the puss (yeah yuck) of cowpox to inoculate his family by making a small cut and putting in the puss. It worked.
So anyway, in the 20th century before the disease was eradicated 500 million people died of it. The last person to have it was in 1977. It typically killed the young. Compared to the smallpox virus the current virus is a picnic. That still doesn't take away from the fact that it kills people.
Dr. Edward Jenner worked on the smallpox vaccine. Cowpox is a related disease but after an infection of that, there was immunity to smallpox. Milk maids used to get cowpox, hence the term "Milkmaid complexion."
quote:
By 1768, English physician John Fewster had realised that prior infection with cowpox rendered a person immune to smallpox.[28] In the years following 1770, at least five investigators in England and Germany (Sevel, Jensen, Jesty 1774, Rendell, Plett 1791) successfully tested in humans a cowpox vaccine against smallpox.[29] For example, Dorset farmer Benjamin Jesty[30] successfully vaccinated and presumably induced immunity with cowpox in his wife and two children during a smallpox epidemic in 1774, but it was not until Jenner's work that the procedure became widely understood. Jenner may have been aware of Jesty's procedures and success.[31] A similar observation had also been made in France by Jacques Antoine Rabaut-Pommier in 1780.[32]
Noting the common observation that milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox, Jenner postulated that the pus in the blisters that milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but much less virulent) protected them from smallpox.
Jenner's Hypothesis:
The initial source of infection was a disease of horses, called "the grease", which was transferred to cattle by farm workers, transformed, and then manifested as cowpox.
Dr Jenner performing his first vaccination on James Phipps, a boy of age 8. 14 May 1796
On 14 May 1796, Jenner tested his hypothesis by inoculating James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy who was the son of Jenner's gardener. He scraped pus from cowpox blisters on the hands of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom,[33] whose hide now hangs on the wall of the St George's medical school library (now in Tooting). Phipps was the 17th case described in Jenner's first paper on vaccination.[34]
Jenner inoculated Phipps in both arms that day, subsequently producing in Phipps a fever and some uneasiness, but no full-blown infection. Later, he injected Phipps with variolous material, the routine method of immunization at that time. No disease followed. The boy was later challenged with variolous material and again showed no sign of infection.
Known:
Smallpox is more dangerous than variolation and cowpox less dangerous than variolation.
Hypothesis:
If target is infected with cowpox, then target is immune to smallpox.
Test:
If variolation after infection with cowpox fails to produce a smallpox infection, immunity to smallpox has been achieved.
Consequence:
Immunity to smallpox can be induced much more safely than by variolation.
Donald Hopkins has written, "Jenner's unique contribution was not that he inoculated a few persons with cowpox, but that he then proved [by subsequent challenges] that they were immune to smallpox. Moreover, he demonstrated that the protective cowpox pus could be effectively inoculated from person to person, not just directly from cattle."[35] Jenner successfully tested his hypothesis on 23 additional subjects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
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