In 1377 B.C., the first epidemic of a deadly virus had just happened, which was spread during the Egyptian- Hittite War. The P.O.W.s(prisoners of war) of Egypt captured by the Hittites, some of whom carried the deadly virus, whose wrath would soon be felt by all of the world. The virus had also managed to infect and kill the Hittite king and almost destroyed his civilization. The deadly virus is now known as Smallpox.
Smallpox
Smallpox, as deadly as it was, was also not invincible, and it has been completely eradicated from the face of the Earth by 1980., before its eradication, it claimed the lives of more than a billion people.
The virus’s fate was sealed by the invention of vaccines, however, prevention methods did exist even before that, a technique called variolation was used to prevent a fatal infection of smallpox, it was supposedly developed by a nun in 1022 A.D. in China, living in the famous O Mei Shan mountain.
Variolation: A method of vaccination against Smallpox in which some material(usually pus) from an infected Smallpox person is injected into another person in hopes of protecting them from mild Smallpox infection.
Ironically, this method involved grinding up smallpox scabs and blowing them into the nostrils of a healthy person, and guess what, it worked! Variolation worked because if one gets infected with smallpox once, their body becomes immune to it and can prevent future infections. 30% of the people infected would die in the second week of infection (compare that to just 1.8% fatality rate of COVID 19 in the U.S.), but only 3% of the people who were voluntarily infected died (that’s still a huge chunk of the population). They still bore lifelong scars, that were a reminder of their immunization.
The Breakthrough
The big breakthrough came when Edward Jenner, an English physician noticed that milkmaids who once has cowpox were immune to the smallpox vaccine, on May 1796 A.D.(Anno Domini) he took cowpox scars from Serah Nelmes, a milkmaid inoculated James Phipps, the son of his gardener.
Phipps was down with fever for some time, but when he recovered, Jenner infected James Phipps with smallpox and he didn’t get infected!
Jenner then inoculated several people
and subjected them to smallpox, his findings showed that they were now immune to the smallpox virus and soon after, Variolation was banned and replaced with vaccination, Smallpox was eradicated in 1979 by the W.H.O.
Sources
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