What is it?
Smallpox has been around for hundreds of years. Catching it results in big zits called pustules forming all over the skin. These pustules ooze a liquid called pus that makes the disease spread to other people when touched. Because of this ooze, it is very contagious as it can spread to a lot of people.
Recovering to full health after catching it was hard at times. The Aztec civilization in South America were wiped out largely because of it.
Those who recover get scabs where the zits used to be, which often developed into scars (Moore, 2006).
How did we fight it?
For many, many years, we had no way of fighting smallpox because we did not know enough about it or immunity. It spread quickly and spared no one, even infecting the Queen of England way back in the 1600s!
Before vaccines, people used to take the scabs of people who had smallpox and rub them on uninfected people! So gross!
But it actually would work somehow to prevent people from catching smallpox! This was not always safe as some people would actually catch smallpox from the scab instead.
Fun fact! – to “inoculate” means to teach to the immune system about a disease by inserting an immunologically active substance into the body, such as the scab above or a vaccine
But – this was the first time humanity figured out how we could use help our immune systems recognize a disease before becoming infected. This understanding would later be used to make the first vaccine!
The First Vaccine Ever
There are other pox’s that mainly infect other animals, like monkeypox and monkeys, or cowpox and cows! Often these pox’s can infect humans too, and so farmers would often catch cowpox. But these infections would be not as bad as catching smallpox was.
One day in 1796, a guy named Edward Jenner noticed that when people caught cowpox, they displayed complete immunity to smallpox!
He decided to do a gross experiment. He took the pus (ooze from the zits) of a cowpox victim and rubbed it into a little boys cut. Six weeks later, Edward exposed the same kid to smallpox! This sort of science is no longer allowed because it is very dangerous.
However, the boy did not catch smallpox and was indeed immune to it! Edward invented the first vaccine ever – pus from cowpox zits. Although it’s probably the grossest vaccine ever!
One of the Biggest Accomplishments Ever
In the 1960’s, the World Health Organization made a goal to eradicate smallpox across the entire world and we succeeded!
In 1980, smallpox was declared extinct thanks to widespread vaccination. It is the first and only infectious disease to be considered eradicated, a major accomplishment considering how smallpox has harmed us for thousands of years! (World Health Organization, 2022)
Monkeypox
Fun fact! – Monkeypox is not only between monkeys. We only named it that because we first saw it in monkeys, but it can and does spread to other animals including rats and us.
References
Miksanek, T. (2007). Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 298(24), 2914–2920.
Moore, Z. S., Seward, J. F., & Lane, J. M. (2006). Smallpox. The Lancet, 367(9508), 425–435.
World Health Organization. Smallpox. Retrieved July 18, 2022, from https://www.who.int/health-topics/smallpox