Primed for smallpox

Small pox was a horrible disease: fever, vomiting, rash, pustules, unslakable thirst, swelling, death. If you survived, you were left horribly scarred and possibly blind. Most people don’t know that the first person who advocated inoculating people against the disease was an English noblewoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (born 1689). Smallpox was the biggest killer of her time. It killed her brother and nearly killed her. It happened that, on a trip to Turkey in 1717, she observed old women taking some pus from a smallpox sufferer and, using a needle, scratching a bit of it into a child’s skin. The children inoculated this way would have a mild case for a few days, then recover and never get the pox again. Before she left Turkey, Lady Mary had one of the women inoculate her own son in this way.

After returning to England, she tried convincing physicians of the inoculation idea, but they, of course, were disdainful. Nevertheless, she talked one physician into inoculating her daughter, who was three at the time. The procedure went well. After a time, Lady Mary succeeded in convincing a few more physicians to give it a try (actually, experimenting on prisoners). The rest, of course, is history, except that a physician named Edward Jenner, noting that milkmaids never got smallpox, figured out that inoculating people with cowpox was safer and more effective than inoculating with smallpox. Of course, Jenner gets the credit for the vaccination idea. Incidentally, the term, vaccination, comes from the latin word vacca, for cow. (In case you've forgotten, being inoculated with small doses of virus primes your immune system such that it can quickly attack an invader it "remembers.")

Today there is no smallpox. Not a single case on earth since the 1970s. Thanks to vaccinations, it’s been wiped out. Except, that is, for one mishap. In 1978, Janet Parker, a photographer in Birmingham, England, got smallpox after taking photographs of tissues and organs for doctors’ files. Somehow, she’d come into contact with samples that were supposed to have been locked away. Other people caught it from her. Parker died. Within a few years of her death all lab stocks of smallpox virus in the world were destroyed except for some samples kept in two tightly locked-down laboratories, one in the US and one in Russia.

Since the Parker incident in 1978, no one has had smallpox. In the US, routine smallpox vaccinations for every child were discontinued in 1971 and only a small fraction of humans are immune to it (old people who had it and survived).  Today the only samples of the smallpox virus are kept in two tightly locked-down labs, one at the CDC in Atlanta, and one in Russia. 

After 9/11 the US started a crash program to stockpile millions of doses of the smallpox vaccine. Gotta watch out for those Russians.

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