Smallpox and the First Global Hero!

[PoliticalChic]

1. 'In the 1760s, a young apprentice surgeon named Edward Jenner was examining a milkmaid for cowpox, and occupational febrile illness which produced painful pustular sores.'

2. During the exam, the milkmaid that, according to common folktales, this would protect her from getting smallpox. Jenner never forgot the tale.

3. May 14, 1796, Jenner thought of a way to test the 'remedy,' and came to perform mankind's first vaccination: he lanced a sore on the wrist of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, and scratched the arm of 8-year-old James Phipps with the same instrument.

4. Phipps came down with a mild case of cowpox...but, even after several exposures to smallpox, he never came down with the deadly disease.



5. How deadly? Smallpox killed sixty million people in that century, disfiguring and blinding many millions more.

6. Into the 1950s, the scourge continued to claim some two million lives each year. The microbe was transmitted by respiration as well as by casual contact.




7. In 1967 a multinational campaign to eradicate smallpox was launched, and in 1976, a 3-year-old Bangladeshi girl named Rahima Banu was cured of the last naturally occurring case of variola major, the more severe strain.

a. "Rahima Banu Begumis the last known person to have been infected with naturally occurringVariola majorsmallpox, the more deadly variety of the disease. The case was reported on 16 October 1975, when Banu was less than two years old, and living in the village ofKuraliaonBhola Islandin theBangladeshdistrict ofBarisal. Her case was reported by an eight-year-old girl, Bilkisunnessa, who was paid 250taka."
Rahima Banu - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia




8. On October 26, 1977, a 23-year-old Somalian cook, Ali Maow Maalin, recovered from the final case of variola minor.

a. "Ali Maow Maalin(alsoMao Moallim[2]andMao' Mo'allim[3]) (1954 – 22 July 2013) was a Somali hospital cook and health worker fromMercawho is the last person known to be infected with naturally occurring Variola minor smallpox in the world. He was diagnosed with the disease in October 1977 and made a full recovery. Although he had many contacts, none of them developed the disease and an aggressive containment campaign was successful in preventing an outbreak. Smallpox was declared to have been eradicated globally by theWorld Health Organization(WHO) two years later."
Ali Maow Maalin - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia




9. Smallpox is the only virus ever to succumb to the efforts of mankind. The only strain extant remains frozen and archived among tens of thousands of high-risk biological agents

a." One of the deadliest diseases known to humans, smallpox is the only disease to have been eradicated by vaccination." Disease Eradication mdash History of Vaccines



b. " Currently, the only remaining known variola virus isolates are frozen in closely guarded repositories at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States and at the VECTOR Institute in Russia.."
Medscape Medscape Access

The idea for the above from the novel "The Blood Artists," by Chuck Hogan; includes interesting discussion of viruses.

 

[PoliticalChic]

10. Ever call in sick due to strep throat? No biggie, ...but at one time it was often a fatal infection.

Rabies, being bitten by a rabid dog, although also treatable, is still fatal if untreated. It kills over 50,000 people every year.
It almost did just that for a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, living in Alsace, France, in 1885.


"July 6, 1885..... Joseph Meister who had suffered several deep bites after he provoked a rabid dog with a stick. "
TIMELINES Who saved 9-year-old Joseph Meister after a dog attack on July 6 1885 International World Epoch Times


Meister had this to look forward to: fever, depression, convulsions, mania, foaming at the mouth, eventual paralysis and then death.
Rabies Symptoms - Diseases and Conditions - Mayo Clinic

There was no cure and no treatment.


Meister's mother took the boy to Paris, to see Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was not a doctor, he was a chemist, but he had done experiments with the weakened germs of dead animals.


Remember....at that time the idea of invisible particles causing disease was scoffed at.

The Eye Does Not See What the Mind Does Not Know: the bacterium in the worm
The eye does not see what the mind does not know the bacterium in ... - PubMed - NCBI

 

[Mr. H.]

#2 above is confusing. Can you edit it?

 

[PoliticalChic]

#2 above is confusing. Can you edit it?

This may help....this is why I mentioned Joseph Meister:

11. " Pasteur had seen success, treating infected dogs with preventive vaccinations made from air-drying the spinal cords of rabid rabbits, so he decides to try his technique on the boy.


Meister was given 13 injections and survives. News of the boy’s recovery spreads quickly and within months Pasteur had treated 726 successful cases. Pasteur, also the father of pasteurization, dies in Paris in 1895.


Some years later, the same Joseph Meister ends up working as a guard at the Pasteur Institute, keeping watch over his benefactor’s tomb." TIMELINES Who saved 9-year-old Joseph Meister after a dog attack on July 6 1885 International World Epoch Times


12. Probably apocryphal....but nevertheless a charming myth has grown up about Joseph Meister, and his abiding loyalty to the man who had saved him, Louis Pasteur.


"....young Meister entered medical history: he was Louis Pasteur's first human patient to be treated and saved by a rabies vaccine.

For more than half a century, accounts of the story in both English and French have been given a dramatic ending.
In 1940, 55 years after his life was saved, Meister was serving as a gatekeeper at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The story goes that when German forces invaded Paris in June that year, soldiers arrived at the institute demanding access to Pasteur's tomb and, rather than surrender his saviour's resting place to the Nazis, the 64-year-old Meister killed himself."
History Great myths die hard Nature News Comment



Such is the story of "only the second human vaccine in history after Jenner's....but it was the very first to be manufactured in a laboratory, and it was the first derived from the same infective agent that caused the disease....Modern human virology finds its genesis in Pasteur's pioneering work...."
Chuck Hogan, the novel "The Blood Artists," p.223.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Joseph Meister's is not the only story in medial annals that tends toward an embrace of mythology....

13. " A myth-making pattern seems to be emerging from the researches of many science historians over recent decades.... [Alexander] Fleming, for example, did isolate the antibacterial product of a mould, and did name it penicillin. But he was not responsible for the development of the antibiotic drug used in humans 14 years later, nor was he even in contact with the scientists responsible for that.

The catalysts to the making of this myth are fairly easily identified. Successful clinical trials of penicillin were first reported in 1941, in the thick of the Second World War, when infected wounds caused enormous casualties. Wartime newspaper editors naturally looked for heroic stories to inspire and encourage readers.

Accounts traced the miracle drug to Fleming's serendipitous discovery many years earlier — asThe Times of 12 June 1944 put it: “Providence had been kind to us in letting us have this most powerful agent ... when against our will we were plunged into a bloody war.” Similarly, Meister's story was probably distorted in part because of the war. The heroic version of his suicide embellishes the Pasteur legend and doubles as a tale of resistance.

The Fleming legend too has seen attempts at further glorification, with the claim that Fleming saved the life of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill — twice. As a child, Fleming purportedly rescued a young Churchill from drowning, and later he was said to have cured Britain's leader with penicillin. Both claims were eventually discredited (see go.nature.com/hfakhl)." History Great myths die hard Nature News Comment

 

[PoliticalChic]

14. "1854: Physician John Snow convinces a London local council to remove the handle from a pump in Soho. A deadly cholera epidemic in the neighborhood comes to an end immediately, though perhaps serendipitously. Snow maps the outbreak to prove his point … and launches modern epidemiology." Sept. 8 1854 Pump Shutdown Stops London Cholera Outbreak WIRED



"Tenacious myths have heroes and villains, portray tragedy and triumph, and present climactic actions and revelations. For example, Snow did map the London cholera outbreak and correctly attributed it to a contaminated public water pump. Inconveniently, he did not remove the pump handle and end the outbreak. A committee took that action, and only after the outbreak had abated.

Scientific myths are harmful. They distort the history and the process of science1by portraying researchers as extraordinary people making epic advances in a fast, linear fashion. Such tales are particularly damaging to the public's and to students' understanding of the pace and complexity of science....[ignoring] the vast time, effort and extra data that are required to make a medically viable [discovery]. And, by crediting luminaries with fictional achievements, we create superheroes that no student can hope to match."
History Great myths die hard Nature News Comment