Amidst the COVID pandemic, the COVID vaccine has become mandatory for citizens in many countries. Vaccination drives have saved countless lives so far and will continue to do so. Did you ever wonder who invented the first vaccine?
It was a physician named Edward Jenner who was born on May 17, 1749 in Berkeley, England. In Jenner’s time smallpox killed nearly 20 per cent of the population.
Jenner knew that if a person who had already been infected by smallpox survived, that person could not be re-infected. At that time some physicians were deliberately introducing the smallpox virus in healthy candidates for them to contract a milder form of the disease and thus be protected. This practice was called variolation. The problem with this practice was that there was a chance that the candidate could get a severe form of the disease and die from variolation.
At this time Jenner was studying to be a surgeon in Sodbury, Bristol. He overheard a dairymaid say to her friend that she could not get smallpox as she had recovered from cowpox. Cowpox is a viral disease contracted from cattle. This set Jenner thinking. In May, 1796, he found a dairymaid with fresh cowpox lesions on her hand and introduced some of the matter from her lesions into the hand of a healthy 8-year-old boy – James Phipps. The boy developed mild symptoms and later showed immunity to smallpox.
Jenner decided to call this new procedure vaccination because ‘vacca’ means cow in Latin and cowpox is vaccinia in Latin. With the discovery of this new procedure scientists began developing vaccines for many other diseases like diphtheria, tetanus and rabies.
Jenner is regarded as the father of immunology and it is believed that his work has saved more lives than the work of any other human. Almost two centuries after Jenner invented the first vaccine, the 33rd World Health Assembly declared the world free of smallpox on May 8, 1980. This year we celebrate the 42nd anniversary of this medical milestone.
Picture Credit : Google
