Читать книгу The Little Book of Medical Breakthroughs - Dr. Naomi Craft - Страница 20

In 1977 Smallpox became the first disease to be completely eradicated from the world as a result of a successful vaccination programme.

In the late 18th century, Edward Jenner was working as an English country doctor. Smallpox was rife – as many as one in ten people were affected – and it was usually fatal.

Jenner noticed that milkmaids who were infected with cowpox – a disease of cattle that occasionally affected humans – were protected against smallpox. Cowpox in humans is a mild disease, so Jenner thought perhaps there might be a safe way of using this knowledge to protect people against smallpox.

In 1796 he removed a small amount of the discharge inside a milkmaid’s cowpox pustule and injected it into an eight-year-old boy. Although he developed a fever, he soon recovered. Six weeks later Jenner injected the discharge from a smallpox pustule into the same boy, and nothing happened. The boy was protected from smallpox by the cowpox vaccine. Jenner’s results quickly caught on – and by 1799 over 5,000 people had been vaccinated.

See: The Eradication of Smallpox, page 141