Every year, vaccines save more than 2.5 million children, which is similar to about 285 every hour; however, not everyone in the world believes that vaccines are safe (ProCon). In 1796, British Doctor Edward Jenner created the first vaccine to prevent smallpox by noticing that the milkmaids who were exposed to cowpox were immune to it (Ballarlo). Scientists realized the importance of this and began to research on the creation of vaccines for other illnesses. Unexpectedly, it was French chemist Louis Pasteur who, while researching why there is spoilage in wine, found “germs” (Burge). From that discovery, he speculated that if germs could be found in wine, then it can probably be found in animals, plants, and humans too. This was how …show more content…
His experiment consisted of two people, a young milkmaid who had cowpox and an eight-year-old boy. Firstly, he used the young milkmaid to infect the eight-year-old boy by taking “cowpox matter (Ballarlo)” from the milkmaid and injecting it into the boy’s arm. A week after the inoculation, the boy became ill, but that only lasted a day. With that confirmation, Jenner experimented with cowpox. At first, he was hesitant, because he was afraid that his theory might be wrong, which would lead to the death of the boy. In the end, the boy stayed healthy for weeks and that was when Jenner concluded his theory was right. He named his discovery “vaccine” after the Latin word for cowpox, but scientists and researchers adapted this name to describe any agent that was able help people build immunity towards diseases by injecting a milder version of the disease.
It was not until Pasteur’s discovery that vaccines were able to defend against more diseases. Pasteur had been looking for a way to create a vaccine for anthrax, a type of disease in sheeps and cattle, when a scientist sent him a head of a rooster that had died of chicken cholera, asking him to help find a way to prevent it. He accepted this challenge and found a way of growing chicken cholera germs in culture by putting germs into a container of chicken broth. However, they had to constantly grow more of these
It was during this era that Edward Jenner invented a vaccine to prevent smallpox by inoculating a healthy eight-year old boy with cowpox;
The concept of vaccines, basically exposure to a disease to trick the body into forming immunity, has been controversial from its beginnings. The history of vaccines began in 1796 with Edward Jenner, a doctor from England, who performed the first immunization (Alexandra, Markel, 2005). Edward Jenner showed that a certain level of immunity could be accomplished by dosing patients with cowpox, which is a close relative of smallpox (Alexandra, Markel, 2005). He then tried, without success, to infect that same
However, Jenner’s invention became a common practice only a few years after he released it to the public, and according to The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia, “By 1890 smallpox had virtually been eradicated from Britain.” (“Jenner, Edward (1749-1823)”) From the information about the first vaccination, we can see that vaccinations have been proven to eliminate deadly diseases, whether they receive opposition or not. Without immunizations, we would be overcome with diseases, such as smallpox, polio, and measles.
In the book, “Survival of the Sickest”, Sharon Moalem forms the basis of how vaccine originated to become a way of combatting the most dangerous diseases in the world. It began with a discovery from a man named Edward Jenner, a doctor from Gloucestershire county in England, where he began to understand a strange pattern when people who were immune to cowpox were struggling with smallpox and vice-versa. He started to test his findings through a small experiment where he injected cow pox into a group of young children and he was surprised to see that their bodies built immunity towards smallpox and supported his findings on the bizarre immunity of people towards either the smallpox or the cowpox but not to both. The rest of the chapter explains complex concepts
The history of vaccinations begin with Edward Jenner, the country doctor from Gloucestershire who found, growing on cows, a nearly harmless virus the protected people from smallpox. Jenner’s vaccine was safer, more reliable, and more durable than variolation, and it is still the only vaccine to have eliminated its reason for being-in 1980, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease extinct. For nearly a century and a half, smallpox was the only vaccine routinely administered, and it saved millions of lives . But the controversy that marked the return of the vaccine, amid bioterrorism hysteria in 2002, was only the latest twist in the remarkable, mysterious life of vaccines.
Mandatory vaccination continues to be a contentious subject in the United States, even though extensive evidence proves inoculation prevents certain diseases. According to A. Plotkin & L. Plotkin (2011), the evolution of the first vaccine commenced in the 1700’s when a physician named Edwards Jenner discovered that cowpox protected individuals from one of the deadliest diseases termed smallpox. The precise virus Jenner used is unclear; however, it was espoused in the extermination of smallpox worldwide. The researchers further explained, the unearthing of the subsequent vaccine known as chicken cholera occurred approximately 80 years later by Louise Pasteur. Ever since, copious vaccines such as rabies, yellow fever, varicella, pneumococcal, mumps and recently HPV have been introduced.
Henderson, D. A. (1997). Edward Jenner’s vaccine. Public Health Reports, 112(2), 116-21. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/230183418?accountid=458
Growing up we are always told, “Make sure you get your flu shot!” That leads to the question of where did vaccines come from? As a society we have benefited from vaccines for over two centuries. However, the road to proper vaccines hasn’t been an easy one. In 1796 Edward Jenner, a doctor located in England, performed the first vaccination. The need for this vaccine was because milkmaids from around the country were becoming infected with cowpox. Based on his findings from this vaccine and several others, Jenner published a book that would later become a classic in the art of medicine. This book was, Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccine. According to authors Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel, this text laid the foundation for modern vaccinology (Stern & Markel,
In today’s society we use many vaccines that help prevent many different diseases. Some of these are live, attenuated vaccines, inactivated vaccines, subunit vaccines, toxoid vaccines, conjugate vaccines, DNA vaccines, recombinant vector vaccines. There are also multiple benefits of children getting there vaccinations early. There are also some downsides to vaccinations which will looked at directly as well. The importance of these vaccines are a great help and ultimately outweigh the shortcomings to this.
According to the World Health Organization, a vaccine boosts the body’s immunity to a particular disease through the administration of an agent that resembles the disease-causing microbe, which is often composed of the diluted or dead microbe, its toxins or proteins. The agent rouses the immune system identifying it as foreign, destroys it, and then remembers it so that the immune system can easily recognize and destroy these same microbes in the event it encounters it again. It is often said that the first successful vaccine was developed, introduced and administered in 1796 by Edward Jenner to prevent the spread of smallpox. However, evidence points out that the inoculation of smallpox existed in China in 1000 C.E. and was later practiced
During the 19th century, despite clear evidence of protection against smallpox by immunization with cowpox, there was a strong anti-vaccination movement that resulted in ongoing smallpox outbreaks and unnecessary deaths (Poland & Jacobson, 2011). Between the 1940s and the early 1980s, anti-vaccine thinking was less prevalent. The reason for this was because of a number of trends. There was an increase in vaccine science, discovery, and production. There was also an increase in public awareness of widespread outbreaks of infectious diseases. With
Vaccines have been used to prevent diseases for centuries, and have saved countless lives of children and adults. The smallpox vaccine was invented as early as 1796, and since then the use of vaccines has continued to protect us from countless life threatening diseases such as polio, measles, and pertussis. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2010) assures that vaccines are extensively tested by scientist to make sure they are effective and safe, and must receive the approval of the Food and Drug Administration before being used. “Perhaps the greatest success story in public health is the reduction of infectious diseases due to the use of vaccines” (CDC, 2010). Routine immunization has eliminated smallpox from the globe and
Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Vaccines Edward Jenner (1749-1823) trained in London, under John Hunter, and was an army surgeon for a period of time. After that, he spent his whole career as a country doctor in his home county, Gloucestershire (West of England). His research was based on careful case studies and clinical observation more than a hundred years before scientists could explain what viruses and diseases actually were. His innovative new method was successful to such an extent that by 1840 the British government had banned alternative preventive treatments against smallpox. [IMAGE]
Pasteur had already done work six years earlier with the disease chicken cholera, a disease that was to blame for the elimination of chicken flock in France. Through this one vaccine he produced for a single species of bird, he was able to discover the phenomena of virulence, or the harmful quality of a microorganism that causes the
Today most children in the United States live a much healthier life and parents live with much less anxiety due to vaccinations. More than 200 years ago, Edward Jenner conducted an experiment that would be one of the most astounding breakthroughs in medical history. Jenner noticed that milkmaids didn’t catch the smallpox, a disease rampant across the English countryside. He reasoned that the blisters on the milkmaid’s hand must contain something that was protective. He tested his theory by taking fluid from a blister on the wrist of a milkmaid and inoculating it into the arm of a local laborer’s son (Offit and