Vaccination Eradication Terms Commentary

Edward Jenner immunology

Vaccination

• The symptoms of cowpox are recoverable—
• a mild fever and blistering,
• but the symptoms of smallpox
• were painful and disfiguring or fatal,
• and if it didn't kill, it could blind.
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
• introduced in England the method of “variolation”
• that had been practiced in Turkey,
• infecting a person with the smallpox virus, variola,
• to induce immunity against further infection.
• Some still died of this cure.
• Meanwhile, it was commonly observed
• milkmaids did not get smallpox,
• and many people, such as Doctor Fewster,
• claimed an infection of cowpox
• prevented smallpox.
• The Dorset farmer Benjamin Jesty
• innoculated his wife and kids
• from an infected cow
• during the smallpox epidemic
• in seventeen seventy-four,
• and Edward Jenner might have known of Jesty.
• But Jenner was the first to show
• that cowpox could be exchanged
• by transferring the pus from a cowpox blister
• from human to human
• and the first to prove
• that vaccination worked—
• the twenty-three persons
• whom he innoculated with cowpox
• were immune to smallpox.

Eradication

• Jenner’s method was quickly adopted
• throughout Europe
• and the United States.
• Yet in the early fifties
• fifty million cases of smallpox
• still occurred in the world each year.
• In 1967, the World Health Organization
• launched a plan
• to eradicate it.
• It was not easy;
• each outbreak
• had to be stopped from spreading.
• The methods were identification
• isolation,
• and innoculation.
• Over one hundred years
• after Jenner introduced his method,
• smallpox was eradicated
• throughout the world.

Terms

• The smallpox virus is called variola
• so innoculation with smallpox
• was called variolation.
• Variola is derived from the Latin
• varius meaning “spotted”
• or varus meaning “pimple.”
• The Latin for “cow” is vacca,
• so Edward Jenner
• coined the term vaccination,
• which now refers to the method
• of administering an antigen
• to induce an immunity.