“Smallpox also provided the incentive for the development of protective measures (variolation and vaccination), affected the cultural responses to disease, and contributed to the establishment of more-humane public health policies.”
The variola virus or better known as smallpox’s was/is a very deadly disease that started in the Egyptian Empire around the 3rd century, what it came from was unknown to the people then but it spread quickly and took out many people in which it infected. Smallpox was a very strong killer in that 3 out of every 10 people that had it died from it. When the first outbreaks occurred people were unprepared. Medicine was not around and there were no remedies that seemed to work. Like many devastating diseases around this time period, people turned to prayer and odd remedies. There were many Gods created to represent the Smallpox’s disease. They tried to give goods and do human sacrifices to appease the God’s and make the disease go away but nothing seemed to work. Then some of the remedies involved in fighting off smallpox include bloodletting (where you would lose large amounts of blood in thought that the disease would leave your body), they used leeches, fasting, laxatives, purgatives, and diuretics. They would also bring heat and sweat therapy as long as cold therapy into play. These remedies actually really helped the disease take over the body by weakening the immune system and made smallpox more disastrous, but again modern science was not involved back then so people had to try different things because smallpox, much like the Black Death had been something they had never seen or expected. There was also a remedy called “Red Treatment” that came in the late 19th century from Niels Finsen. But during the 18th century we start to see two combatives for smallpox and they are variolation (inoculation) and insufflation and then vaccination. Variolation is when healthy people would expose themselves to the smallpox by scratching the bumps and putting the substance into their system by either opening wounds or inhaling it through the nose. Although it was not a 100% at preventing death those that did this did tend to survive more than those that got the smallpox virus naturally. Patients would get a fever and majority of the illnesses criteria but would be able to overcome the sickness and then wouldn’t catch the smallpox as it was still passed around. It was the first idea into a vaccination. Math was done on the variolation process and it was believed that if you got smallpox naturally you had a 1 in 5 chance of dying, while if you did the inoculation it turned into 1 in 100 chance of dying. In 1803 we see the term Vaccination which when shortened to “vaccinia” means cowpox and that’s a very fitting name. Edward Jenner was a scientist at the time that heard different stories of men who worked with cows and caught cowpox and recovered but then were immune to smallpox. Jenner was intrigued with the idea and took it into his own hands to see so he inoculated his son with the cowpox to see what would happen. For a week his son was very ill and sick, but recovered and was back to normal. Jenner then put the smallpox disease into his son and saw that nothing happened to him, he had become immune to it so now there was a vaccine to fight off the smallpox. Reactions were huge, as Jenner’s work was put all over Europe and he even got some love from the Vatican. But like most things there was backlash as well. Socially it was that now that people could fight it off meant that the poor population that was dying off could fight it which would result in a larger poorer group of individuals. From the religious side people thought that Jenner was now messing with God’s plan and stopping the deaths that he had planned out. Then finally it was the first vaccine of its kind so it raised a lot of questions in the scientific community.
For states fighting over the compulsory vaccination there are a few pros and cons. For the 10 states that had compulsory there was an average of 6.6 incidences out of 100,000, then for the 4 states that prohibited compulsory vaccine there were a total 115.2 incidences. The pros of compulsory are that it has the potential to end the disease totally and prevent you from getting it. Some cons are that people believed the vaccine was worse than the actual disease. There was a large fear with this idea because it became so widely known even though it was the first of its kind so it scared some people. Then finally it takes away individuals rights to make decisions for their body and what they want to do with it. Although it might be safe it is unlawful to make someone do something to their body that they do not want to do. We saw draconian public health measures when the first mandatory laws for vaccination came out with strict isolation for those who did not get vaccinated and anyone they communicated with got quarantined. And because of the draconian public health measures there were numerous protests that eventually allowed for parents to have a say over whether or not the child gets the vaccination.
For the eradication of smallpox using surveillance and containment it was hard because of low funding when it first began because there are way more people than made vaccine at that time. It was also hard to get the vaccine all over the world. Then with the ever-growing rate of people traveling and moving around, especially to North America it was hard to prevent smallpox from traveling with immigrants. But finally on May 8th, 1980 they said the world was free of smallpox. It is the biggest achievement of international public health. They had to use surveillance to make sure the disease didn’t spread to different parts of the world, parts that already eradicated it, and then they had to contain it to that area to make sure it was stopped there.