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Easily avoid serious illness

September 8, 2020   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

The theory of preventing a disease by introducing the disease in small quantities to a person to build up an immunity has actually been around a long time, and practiced in various methods and cultures.

Sometimes it actually worked to some degree, although no one was really sure why.

It wasn’t until 1798 that English physician and scientist, Edward Jenner, figured it out and decided to test his theory.

During the late 18th century, smallpox killed around 10 per cent of the population where Jenner lived, with that number as high as 20 per cent in cities where the infection was more easily spread.

Inoculation was already a standard practice but carried with it some risks, notably the fear that those inoculated would then infect other people as they were now carriers of the disease.

There was a lot of research going on at the time by noted scientists trying to figure out how all this worked. They had already figured out that a prior infection with cowpox rendered a person immune to smallpox.

Jenner observed that ‘milkmaids’ were generally immune to smallpox. His theory was that since milkmaids had already contracted cowpox, a similar disease but much less virulent, there must be a connection that protected them.

He chose an eight year-old boy named James Phipp, in which to test his theory. There’s no word on whether James knew he was being used as a human guinea pig and volunteered, or whether he was volunteered by someone else under the premise he would get a treat for helping the doctor.

Jenner took a sample of the cowpox and inoculated the boy with it. The boy produced a fever and some uneasiness but no full-blown infection. Jenner’s theory proved correct, and the modern vaccination was born.

In 1979, the World Health Organization declared smallpox an eradicated disease.

Currently there are vaccines to prevent more that 20 life-threatening diseases. There are vaccines to prevent cholera, human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, influenza, malaria, measles, pliomyelitis, rubella, and yellow fever. You’ve probably had a tetanus shot, and something to prevent diphtheria.

Your dog would thank you, if they understood, for getting him a rabies shot. That’s something that could also come in handy for you if you happened to be bit by a bat while on vacation.

You can get vaccines to protect you from foreign type diseases like malaria, if you plan on visiting a different country.

With all the success vaccines have produced, you would think it would be common sense to get your child vaccinated, and yet there are still groups of people out there who oppose vaccinations.

The anti-vaxxer groups have all sorts of literature with lists of reasons why you shouldn’t get your child vaccinated.

However, the medical and scientific community – the people who earn their living in, and have the knowledge in this field – can prove point by point, why most of this information is false.

As part of my on-going historical research, I came across a very interesting grave marker in an old pioneer type cemetery. The cemetery is well kept, but hasn’t been active for years. The stone seems to be a lot newer than would have have typically been placed there at the time of burial in 1889.

The headstone lists parents, and the names of their children. All five children, ages 8 months, to 14 years old, died within a month and five days of each other. The father died around two months prior to the first child’s death due to ‘an illness’ according to his obituary.

There seems to be no records, at least that I could find, about what caused the death of five children in the same family in such a short period of time. Perhaps descendants of the family in the area have been told the story, but I would guess some kind of disease ran rampant through that household killing all those children over 130 years ago. There are few newspaper resources currently available previous to 1900, at least online.

If a vaccine for the disease that killed those children was available at the time, those kids would probably have lived to grow up and have families of their own rather than be relegated to a name etched in granite before their lives even got started.

A search through newspaper archives reveals epidemics did occur fairly regularly at the turn of the 20th century and people had to be quarantined to avoid an even bigger outbreak.

While the current situation we are currently going through is new to us all, you can still protect your children from known diseases by a simple, maybe several, vaccinations to keep them healthy.


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