Small Pox History

The History of Smallpox Smallpox once covered the globe. In Europe alone, 400,000 people a year use to die from it. It used to be extremely infectious. Smallpox started with little brown dots on your skin called macules. After a while each little dot raised up into a bump called a papule. Three or four days later, each papule became a blister called a pustule, a hard round bead under the skin. The patient’s whole body was covered in these, but especially his face, hands and feet. Sometimes the blisters ran together so there was no regular skin between them, so the patient’s whole body was completely covered in fever pellets. After several days, each pustule burst open and bled then scabbed over. It took a single pustule about six days to dry up, but it could take two or three weeks …show more content…
When a patient got infected, he didn’t feel sick and he didn’t have a rash. Twelve to fourteen days went by. The patient still didn’t know that there was anything wrong. For those twelve to fourteen days the patient was not infectious to other people. When the patient started to feel sick, he felt really sick, really fast. Right away he had high temperatures, chills, rigor (stiffness), terrible headaches, terrible backaches, pain in his arms and legs, plus a cough and a horrible rash. Pretty soon the patient was so sick he was all but in a coma and maybe delirious. By then he was so weak, he also had heart problems, bronchitis and pneumonia, which is what really killed him. In 1965, an American guy named Donald Henderson got put in charge of a World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox. It was the Russians asking for this and it was President Lyndon B. Johnson who funded it. The President told Henderson’s team they had ten years to get rid of smallpox. It would be the first time in the history of the world people actually got rid of a disease for