Cowpox

perceived to have expressed some possible immunity in those who were in good health. English physician Edward Jenner happened to be in a countryside where milkmaids became infected with cowpox. Cowpox is alike to smallpox, only it is an innocuous disease. People then believed that whoever was to come down with cowpox are…

Today smallpox is an eradicated disease. However, fears of the disease still exist. In 2014 vials of smallpox were discovered in a refrigerator at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. There are also fears that smallpox could return as biological weapon used by terrorists Following eradication only two nations were allowed to keep samples of smallpox. The Centers For Disease control in the United States has samples of the disease. The Soviet Union and later Russia also retained…

observed that milkmaids became infected with cowpox, but not smallpox when smallpox outbreaks occurred in the community (Stern & Markel, 2005). Edward Jenner decided to test this observation using cowpox (Stern & Markel, 2005). In 1796, Jenner took pus from a cowpox lesion and inoculated James Phipps, who was eight years old at the time (Stern & Markel, 2005). Edward Jenner inoculated Phipps with smallpox several weeks after the inoculation of cowpox and Phipps never contracted smallpox (Stern &…

plan was to extract the cowpox virus and inject it directly into a subject to create immunity. “He came across a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, who had developed cowpox from milking a cow”. (Mhaske, 2010) Without pausing Edward collected the virus from Sarah’s hand. Edward debated with the idea of using the vaccine containing the cowpox virus into someone to induce immunity and in the spring of 1796 finally took the opportunity to test his theory on an 8 year old boy who had a cowpox lymph removed. …

that perhaps their immunity had something to do with the cows. Cows at the time could contract a similar disease called Cowpox, which had similar symptoms to the human small pox disease. Humans could also contract cowpox although it was very rare (McNally, 2001). After 10 years of study Jenner encountered a patient who had contracted cowpox, and this patient claimed that cowpox was protecting her from smallpox. Although this was thought to be only a legend or folklore, Jenner concluded that the…

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…

throne embraced the idea and had themselves inoculated. Moving into the late 1700s, this vaccination idea spread its way to England. In England, a young gentleman named Edward Jenner noticed that if you had cowpox, you never contracted smallpox, so he tested his theory. He used variolation against cowpox on a small boy, then he used it again but against smallpox on the same boy. The boy remained healthy and this method became the world's’ first vaccination. He then went on to name this way of…

A vaccine is a suspension of attenuated/weakened or killed microorganisms of a virus or bacteria administered for prevention, improvement of severity or treatment of infectious disease. The devastation of mankind by small pox many centuries ago lead to the origins of immunization. Smallpox is believed to have appeared around 10’000 BC. Mankind had long been trying to find a cure for this epidemic. The fatality of the disease caused deaths of hundreds of thousands of people annually while leaving…

had five siblings, three sisters and two brothers. When he was only eight years old, he overheard a girl saying that she could not get smallpox because she had already had cowpox. He desired to figure out if this was true. He was taught at eight years old by Daniel Ludlow to be a surgeon. In 1796 he actually gave a boy cowpox in Berkeley, England to see if he would get smallpox later by putting smallpox pus in his arm. He never got smallpox, so he was successful. The death rate significantly…

Introduction Smallpox is a vicious disease that once swept the globe plaguing and causing frenzy among many, even the most powerful of civilizations. Smallpox, also known as the variola virus, leaves its victims with hundreds of open sores that fill with pus and later scab over, disfiguring them and many times causing death. Coupled with a high fever, smallpox is extremely contagious as it can spread through contact with the infected individual’s saliva, coughs, sneezes or even close contact…