I'm doing a school project on the smallpox vaccine. For now it's just a 500-700 word paragraph on it, but later I'll have to do more.
Here's my current rough draft.
Small pox. It’s a disease that most everyone knows of, but doesn’t know too much about. Even less is known to the general public about it’s vaccine along with its extensive trial-and-error history. Most of the adults have gotten the vaccine at one point or another as kids, told that it was either just part of the sequence of shots you get or that it was part of a worldwide get-together to eradicate the disease entirely, but many don’t really understand the disease itself. Before we get into the history and present of the vaccine, though, we clearly need to understand the disease. Small pox is characterized by the large red rash of enlarged pustules that develop along the infecteds face and extremities. Before the obvious effects of it show, the disease can sit contagious and temporarily deactivated in a person for days or even weeks before any symptoms pop up. Small pox doesn’t immediately start with grotesque dots along your body, it often first manifests as a back and head ache along with a high fever and eventual redness to the infected face. 30% of small pox victims died while the majority of the rest suffered conspicuous scars everywhere the pox showed and blindness in extreme cases. In fact, at one point small pox was up higher in terms of civil concerns than the plague! People tried bloodletting, induced vomiting, enemas, and especially desperate prayer, grabbing and begging for anything that might cure their disease. In southeastern Asia small pox also appeared from time to time, but they had devised a both clever and somewhat gross vaccine. When they injected a person with pus (Or any fluids for that matter) from somebody else with small pox the person would seem healthy for about a week until falling ill. After around two or three days of lying around with a very minor case of the pox they would heal up and then be completely immune to the disease. Other variations involved snuffing grinded scabs from an infected person skin, but they all had basically the same effect. Unfortunately this way of immunization carried a slight risk. There was a chance (2-3%) that instead of getting the mild strain of small pox you were supposed to you would contract an especially harsh one from which you would probably die. This method was still popular though, seeing how a 2-3% of death was a massive drop from 30%. As with all medical and technological advancements the vaccine could be better. Edward Jenner, an English physician, discovered and put to use the type of small pox vaccine we use today. Apparently there is a strain of small pox that infects cows (“cowpox”) and Jenner, having done some extensive research on the illness, ventured towards a risky experiment. Taking a sample from one of the infected bovines, he injected it into the arm of young James Phipps. Over a week later the kid developed a single pustule, which healed without any scarring. Jenner than injected the boy with an active strain of small pox, wondering if the boy was now immune. He was. In 1798 Jenner let his work be known to the public while a year later he perfected the art and coined it vaccination, the French term for cowpox. Delighted by the useful procedure, Lady Mary Wortly Montagu (Wife of the British ambassador of Constantinople at the time) helped publicize it after seeing it done first hand during a trip to Ottoman. The public and medical communities were no longer jaded about the vaccine after Montagu gave it to her three-year-old son and witnessed no harmful effects. The vaccinations exploded, now being called ingrafting, with some people even holding pox parties at which everyone would be vaccinated. People (often woman) travelled across Europe with syringes of the vaccine, giving it to anybody who wanted it for a small fee. Eventually small pox departed from Europe, no longer able to flourish. Fast forwarding to 1967, the World Health Organization set out to completely eliminate small pox from all corners of the Earth. Vaccinations took place in communities big and small, no place was denied it especially if a strain of small pox broke out in the area. With countries across the globe all working for this endeavor small pox was declared practically extinct less than ten years later. As of now the vaccination is discontinued and no longer made, though some countries keep an emergency stash of it incase of biological warfare from terrorists.