“Your body would ache, you’d have high fever, a sore throat, headaches and difficulty breathing,” says epidemiologist

Smallpox used to kill millions. But a chance discovery led to the first vaccine, and a transformation in human health.

Smallpox was a terrible disease.

“Your body would ache, you’d have high fever, a sore throat, headaches and difficulty breathing,” says epidemiologist René Najera, editor of the History of Vaccines website.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. “On top of that, you’d get a horrible disfiguring rash over your entire body – pustules filled with pus on your scalp, feet, throat, even lungs – and over the course of a couple of days, they would dry out and start falling off,” says Najera.

With the rise in global trade and the spread of empires, smallpox ravaged communities around the world. Around a third of adults infected with smallpox would be expected to die, and eight out of 10 infants. In the early 18th Century, the disease is calculated to have killed some 400,000 people every year in Europe alone.

Ports were particularly vulnerable. The 1721 smallpox outbreak in the US city of Boston wiped out 8% of the population. But even if you lived, the disease had lasting effects, leaving some of the survivors blind and all of them with nasty scars. “When the scabs fell off, they’d leave you pockmarked and disfigured – some people committed suicide rather than live with the scarring,” Najera says.

Treatments ranged from the useless to the bizarre (and also useless). (…)

There was, however, one genuine cure. Known as inoculation, or variolation, it involved taking the pus from someone suffering with smallpox and scratching it into the skin of a healthy individual. Another technique involved blowing smallpox scabs up the nose. (…)

By the 1700s, it was relatively well known in rural England that a group of people seemed to be immune to smallpox. Milkmaids instead contracted a relatively mild cattle disease called cowpox, which left little scarring.

During a smallpox epidemic in the west of England in 1774, farmer Benjamin Jesty decided to try something. He scratched some pus from cowpox lesions on the udders of a cow into the skin of his wife and sons. None of them contracted smallpox.

It wasn’t, however, until many years later that anyone knew of Jesty’s work. The man credited with inventing vaccination, and more importantly, popularising it, made similar observations and came to similar conclusions.

Edward Jenner was a country doctor working in the small town of Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He had trained in London under one of the foremost surgeons of the day. Jenner’s interest in curing smallpox is thought to be influenced by his childhood experience of smallpox inoculation.

It’s said that Jenner was psychologically scarred by that experience, some of his motivation was just how horrific he'd found it,” says Owen Gower, manager of Dr Jenner’s House Museum. “He was thinking, ‘I want to find an alternative, something that's safer, that's less terrifying’.” (…)

He took some pus from cowpox lesions on the hands of a young milkmaid, Sarah Nelms, and scratched it into the skin of eight-year old James Phipps. After a few days of mild illness, James recovered sufficiently for Jenner to inoculate the boy with matter from a smallpox blister. James did not develop smallpox, nor did any of the people he came into close contact with. (…)

Within 20 years of its discovery, Jenner’s vaccine was already saving millions of lives. Soon, smallpox vaccination was common practice around the world. It was completely eradicated in 1979.

“Personally, it gives me hope for the Covid-19 vaccine,” says Najera. “Now we have 200 years of knowledge of viruses and the immune system, but Jenner did all this without knowing what he was dealing with.” (…)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200928-how-the-first-vaccine-was-born

UCPEL 2021 - QUESTÃO 01

Após a leitura do artigo sobre a varíola, aponte o que NÃO é afirmado.

a) A doença provoca dores no corpo, dificuldade para respirar, febre alta e manchas.

b) A vacina da varíola só apareceu na metade do século 20.

c) No início do século 18 só na Europa a varíola matava 400.000 pessoas por ano.

d) Algumas pessoas cometiam suicídios por causa dos efeitos da varíola.

e) Na epidemia de 1774 na Inglaterra foi possível conter um pouco o avanço da doença.

QUESTÃO ANTERIOR:

- Segundo o Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Inpe) houve aumento de 195% no número de queimadas

GABARITO:

b) A vacina da varíola só apareceu na metade do século 20.