In addition to variolation, many other treatments were touted as beneficial though nothing actually proved to be of any benefit. Remedies included herbal medicines, bloodletting and the infamous "red treatment"(wrap a patient in a red cloth, fill the room with red decor and provide the patient only with red foods and drinks).
Finally, in 1796, English physician Edward Jenner experimented with another method of inoculation using cowpox, instead of smallpox. Jenner had noticed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, did not catch smallpox.
Jenner conducted an experiment using pus from a cowpox lesion to inoculate eight-year-old, James Phipps.
Two months later Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox. Phipps did not develop smallpox. Jenner concluded that Phipps was protected against the disease and that a person could become immune to smallpox without being directly exposed to it. Jenner called his procedure "vaccination" after "vacca", the Latin word for cow, since the origin of this first vaccination was the cowpox virus.
In 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated the Global Eradication Program to completely rid the world of smallpox. Affected countries were able to produce higher quality and larger quantities of freeze-dried vaccines. There were numerous other factors that contributed to the development of this initiative, including the creation of the bifurcated needle, establishment of a surveillance system to detect and investigate cases, and mass vaccination campaigns. By the time the campaign had begun, smallpox had already been eliminated in North America (1952) and Europe (1953). Slowly and steadily, the initiative made progress, and by 1971, smallpox was eliminated in South America, followed by Asia (1975), and finally Africa (1977).
465-million-doses-of-vaccine-across-27-countries-later, the last reported naturally occurring case of smallpox appeared in Somalia. On October 22, 1977, 23-year-old, Ali Maow Maalin, developed the disease and survived. And so smallpox became the first and only human disease to ever be eradicated by vaccination.
The WHO certified the global eradication of smallpox in 1980. Stockpiles of the vaccine are still held in several countries, in case of re-emergence of the disease.
- Rowan Parkinson