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You as doctors will never see a
case of smallpox – this is very different than in your great
grandfather’s era.
Clinicians worked together with public health workers and global
health scientists to eradicate one of the most deadly diseases
know to man. We can continue the success of smallpox.
If we work together on other local problems, we can have
an enormous global impact.
The history of the rise and fall of
smallpox is a success story for "modern“ clinicians and public
health alike. Millions of people died in Europe and Mexico as a
result of widespread smallpox epidemics. The fall of smallpox
began with the realization that survivors of the disease were
immune for the rest of their lives. This led to the practice of
variolation – a process of exposing a healthy person to infected
material from a person with smallpox in the hopes of producing a
mild disease that provided immunity from further infection.
The next step towards the
eradication of smallpox occurred with the observation by English
physician, Edward Jenner, that milkmaids who developed cowpox, a
less serious disease, did not develop the deadly smallpox. In
1796, Jenner took the fluid from a cowpox pustule on a
dairymaid's hand and inoculated an 8-year-old boy. Six weeks
later, he exposed the boy to smallpox, and the boy did not
develop any symptoms. Jenner coined the term "vaccine" from the
word "vaca" which means "cow" in Latin.
His work was initially criticized,
but it soon was rapidly accepted and adopted. By 1800, about
100,000 people had been vaccinated worldwide. In 1967, the World
Health Organization (WHO) started a worldwide campaign to
eradicate smallpox. This goal was accomplished in 10 years due
in a large part to massive vaccination efforts. The last endemic
case of smallpox occurred in Somalia in 1977. On May 8, 1980,
the World Health Assembly declared the world free of smallpox.
Global health research and
information sharing played a very important role in the
eradication of smallpox. As the result of this global effort and
research collaboration of global clinicians, medical students
today is not seeing any cases of smallpox.
For more information about Dr.
Edward Jenner, visit Wikipedia
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