Doctor Robert W. Sears, author of The Vaccination Book: Making the Right Decisions for Your Child, once said, “With the growing mistrust of vaccinations... more and more parents are saying no to vaccines. Illnesses that are very rare right now, that most parents don’t have to fear...” Vaccines have been used for decades, and have continued to change and advance as the scientific field has gained more knowledge on defeating a multitude of diseases and sicknesses. The question is how are vaccines affecting a community? Some of the most well-known diseases with elaborate vaccines well ahead of their time are smallpox, and polio, which helped shape the community of today. Smallpox, also called variola major, was one of the world’s deadliest plagues, killing mostly children during the ninetenth century.
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Jini Patel Thompson, disease expert and author of Should I Vaccinate My Child?, stated that starting as early as 1839, there was an epidemic that “swept through England and killed 22,081 lives”, then another epidemic came in “1857 to 1859 and killed another 14,244 people”. These deadly epidemics caused citizens throught the world to desperatly try to find a vaccine. Another epidemic came in “1863 through 1865 and killed 20,059 citizens”. In “1871 through 1880 the worst epidemic swept through England and killed 44,840” citizens. All of these epidemics were occurring after Edward Jenner had found a cure, but smallpox had evolved since then. According to History.com, an educational infromation and video center, Edward Jenner deliberately infected a child with cowpox by taking “fluid from a cowpox blister and scratched it into the skin” of the boy. A small blister appeared where the fluid was injected, but he soon recovered. Later, Jenner “inoculated [him]...with smallpox matter and no disease developed”. The vaccine was a success; European scientist fled to Jenner for the cure, but the epidemics still occur in England almost a century later due to smallpox evolving and changing to still infect and kill thousands before another cure could be finished. Into the 19th and 20th centuries, scientists still followed Jenner’s example and were able to “develop new vaccines to fight numerous deadly diseases, including polio, whooping cough, measles, tetanus, yellow fever, typhus, and hepatitis B, and many others”. …show more content…
Also by 1970 “more sophisticated smallpox vaccines were developed” and international vaccination programs, such as the World Health Organization took the vaccine to the ends of the earth and “eliminated smallpox worldwide”. Jenner’s findings in his vaccine with smallpox sparked interest in scientists all over. Doctor Jonas Salk and Doctor Albert Sabin had a competition with poliomyelitis, or polio, to see who could find the cure. In Smallpox, Syphilis and Salvation: Medical Breakthroughs That Changed the World by Sherly Ann Persson, researcher and former nurse, wrote in her book that polio is very transmittable from human-to-human “through the mouth due to faecally contaminated water or food.” The incubation period of polio can last from three to thirty-five days, enough time to infect a whole neighborhood without any knowledge of the event. The Britannica Encyclopedia, a global education publisher, gave an outline of the general symptoms that a patient would feel are “fever, nausea, fatigue, and muscle pains and spasms”; normal symptoms for a cold or flu, but these symptoms can sometimes be “followed by more serious and permanent paralysis of muscles in one or more limbs, the throat, or the chest”. The paralysis of polio was the terrifying side, being terror and anguish in the wake of its destruction. Even though most tremble at the thought of paralysis due to polio, “the disease actually affects fewer than one percent” of people diagnosed with poliomyelitis, but “more than ninety percent of people show no signs of illness at all”. Only about five to ten percent of people infected die, and it’s mostly because of respiratory problems. There are three strands of poliomyelitis PV1, which is the most common, PV2, most likely eradicated because “last PV2 case was reported in 1999 in Uttar Pradesh, India”, and PV3, also most likely eradicated. Once a person has been infected, there are treatments to put in place like “complete bed rest, isolation, and careful observation” and if breathing problems still persist, then a patient “may require mechanical aids
Jini Patel Thompson, disease expert and author of Should I Vaccinate My Child?, stated that starting as early as 1839, there was an epidemic that “swept through England and killed 22,081 lives”, then another epidemic came in “1857 to 1859 and killed another 14,244 people”. These deadly epidemics caused citizens throught the world to desperatly try to find a vaccine. Another epidemic came in “1863 through 1865 and killed 20,059 citizens”. In “1871 through 1880 the worst epidemic swept through England and killed 44,840” citizens. All of these epidemics were occurring after Edward Jenner had found a cure, but smallpox had evolved since then. According to History.com, an educational infromation and video center, Edward Jenner deliberately infected a child with cowpox by taking “fluid from a cowpox blister and scratched it into the skin” of the boy. A small blister appeared where the fluid was injected, but he soon recovered. Later, Jenner “inoculated [him]...with smallpox matter and no disease developed”. The vaccine was a success; European scientist fled to Jenner for the cure, but the epidemics still occur in England almost a century later due to smallpox evolving and changing to still infect and kill thousands before another cure could be finished. Into the 19th and 20th centuries, scientists still followed Jenner’s example and were able to “develop new vaccines to fight numerous deadly diseases, including polio, whooping cough, measles, tetanus, yellow fever, typhus, and hepatitis B, and many others”. …show more content…
Also by 1970 “more sophisticated smallpox vaccines were developed” and international vaccination programs, such as the World Health Organization took the vaccine to the ends of the earth and “eliminated smallpox worldwide”. Jenner’s findings in his vaccine with smallpox sparked interest in scientists all over. Doctor Jonas Salk and Doctor Albert Sabin had a competition with poliomyelitis, or polio, to see who could find the cure. In Smallpox, Syphilis and Salvation: Medical Breakthroughs That Changed the World by Sherly Ann Persson, researcher and former nurse, wrote in her book that polio is very transmittable from human-to-human “through the mouth due to faecally contaminated water or food.” The incubation period of polio can last from three to thirty-five days, enough time to infect a whole neighborhood without any knowledge of the event. The Britannica Encyclopedia, a global education publisher, gave an outline of the general symptoms that a patient would feel are “fever, nausea, fatigue, and muscle pains and spasms”; normal symptoms for a cold or flu, but these symptoms can sometimes be “followed by more serious and permanent paralysis of muscles in one or more limbs, the throat, or the chest”. The paralysis of polio was the terrifying side, being terror and anguish in the wake of its destruction. Even though most tremble at the thought of paralysis due to polio, “the disease actually affects fewer than one percent” of people diagnosed with poliomyelitis, but “more than ninety percent of people show no signs of illness at all”. Only about five to ten percent of people infected die, and it’s mostly because of respiratory problems. There are three strands of poliomyelitis PV1, which is the most common, PV2, most likely eradicated because “last PV2 case was reported in 1999 in Uttar Pradesh, India”, and PV3, also most likely eradicated. Once a person has been infected, there are treatments to put in place like “complete bed rest, isolation, and careful observation” and if breathing problems still persist, then a patient “may require mechanical aids