Smallpox Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Smallp ox is an acute infectious disease caused by the variola virus that has been responsible for more human deaths than almost any other agent in history. The disease was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1980 after the annual number of deaths dropped from around 50 million people in the 1950s to two million annually in the late 1960s to zero between 1977 and 1980 thanks to a program of vaccinations. The virus is kept in four secure laboratories around the world in case there is a need to restart production of vaccines, although stocks of vaccine sufficient to treat some 200 million people are maintained. This fact has given rise to some concern over the possible use of the virus in a future terrorist attack. Two infections are recorded in 1978 based at one of the laboratories, but there have been no further outbreaks to date.

Smallpox is recorded in history more than 3,000 years ago and well known individuals believed to have been killed by the disease include the Pharaoh Ramses V (d.1156 B.C.E.), Queen Mary II of England (1662-1702), Tsar Peter II of Russia (1813-51) and King Louis XV of France (1710-74). It is likely to have originated in India or Egypt and spread across most of the rest of the world. Epidemics flashed across continents on a regular basis and killed untold millions.

The fatality rate approached 30 percent and many of the sick were afflicted with numerous small scars, primarily on the face. The initial symptoms are a fever and then skin eruptions that pass through the stages of papule, vesicle, and pustule. This causes the scars, although the exact number and severity of these varies on a case-by-case basis. It is during the early feverish phase of the disease that it can be passed to another person. Fortunately, it is not a highly infectious disease. However, some people suffered a variola minor infection that left them able to continue functioning and hence able to spread the disease more widely. Smallpox was endemic in some societies to the extent that it was considered bad luck to name a child before it had survived the disease.

Smallpox unquestionably played some significant role in the European colonization of the New World. While exact numbers or proportions are hard to come by, death rates among indigenous Aztec of Mexico succumbing to the disease likely were far greater than those in previous European

outbreaks, owing to the lack of immunity among New World native populations. Along with other diseases, moreover, smallpox left a very small labor force for European plantation, and so increased the incentives for the violent trans-Atlantic slave trade of following centuries.

The WHO reports a survey in Vietnam from 1898 that demonstrates that 95 percent of adolescents were pockmarked by smallpox and 90 percent of all cases of blindness were attributed to the disease. No effective treatment of the disease has been discovered, but Edward Jenner helped to indicate possible courses of action by inoculating with cowpox in 1798 and showing this prevented infection.

The capacity to create and implement programs of vaccination was slow to develop. It was not until the creation of the WHO in 1948 that it became possible to mount a truly global attempt to eliminate a problem that endangered the lives of 60 percent of the world’s population. The eradication of the disease is one of the great achievements of international human cooperation. It required the adoption of a single, universal method of approach and a standardization of scientific methods.

Bibliography:

Herve Bazin, The Eradication of Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the First and Only Eradication of a Human Infectious Disease (Academic Press, 2000);
Donald R. Hopkins, The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History (University of Chicago Press, 2002);
McCaa, “Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox and Demographic Catastrophe in Mexico,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (v.25/3, 1995);
Zack Moore, Jane F. Seward, and J. Michael Lane, “Smallpox,” Lancet (v.367, 2006).