maglog

maglog

Sam Pentecost Contributor

At the back end of Insurance News magazine, you might just like to take a break and let your mind absorb something that isn’t news, interviews, articles and pictures. Take a few minutes to appreciate the weirdness of ordinary things. Like, for instance, pandemics and vaccination.

Next time someone raises the subject of vaccination with you – and there’s going to be a debate if your views differ – you can divert any argument by saying “Did you know…?” and tell them one of the following yarns. You might also leave people wondering how having a vaccine in 2021 got to be such a big deal.

So let’s drift back in time to 18th Century England, where smallpox was laying waste to the island kingdom and Europe. At this time smallpox killed around 30% of infected adults and 80% of infants. Survivors would carry disfiguring scars for the rest of their lives, but they would also be immune to catching smallpox again.

Also at this time, a practice common in the strange worlds of Asia and Africa became known in Europe. Inoculation involved taking the pus from the lesions of someone suffering smallpox and scratching it into the skin of a healthy person.

Recipients would normally get a mild case of the disease, but some would develop full-blown smallpox and, being immune but still carriers, pass it on. What was needed was not just inoculation, but mass vaccination.

It was already known that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, instead contracting a much milder skin infection called cowpox. (Incidentally, “vaccination” is derived from the Latin word vaccinia, or cowpox.)

An English country doctor named Edward Jenner took the knowledge, developed a vaccine from cowpox and ensured the world got to hear about it. He refused to earn a penny from his work, which saved millions of people from death or disfigurement.

The experiment he embarked on in 1797 to prove the method worked had a rather informal tone. Jenner took matter from a cowpox lesion on a milkmaid’s arm and scratched it into the skin of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps.

Luckily for poor little Jim the experiment was successful, and after a mild bout of illness he recovered and Jenner inoculated him with matter from a smallpox blister. James did not develop smallpox, and he did not carry the virus.

In 1979 smallpox was officially declared eradicated from Planet Earth.

We now turn to the first mass vaccination campaign conducted by George Washington – he of the Glorious Revolution and the first president of the United States. The American colonists were aware of the wonderful qualities of cowpox before Jenner formalised its treatment, and Washington used it to good effect in 1777 during the War of Independence.

Shortly before the Battle of Saratoga which is credited with flipping the war in favour of the colonists, Washington faced a dilemma. Smallpox was crippling his army, causing many more deaths than the army incurred in battle.

While most British soldiers were immune (cowpox again) 75% of the colonial army wasn’t. Working in great secrecy with few surgeons and no experience, Washington conducted the first mass inoculation of an army – a risky move that enabled the Americans to win at Saratoga and eventually claim victory in the War of Independence.

Here’s some more bits to drop into the conversation and reveal the depth of your knowledge: The “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918-19, which killed around 50 million people – and 15,000 Australians – wasn’t actually Spanish at all.

The pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when wartime censors suppressed bad news. But Spain was neutral in the war, so freely reported the outbreak, accidentally creating a false impression that it was the epicentre. No one actually knows where the virus began.

And finally: The word “influenza” comes from 15th Century Italy, where upper respiratory infections were considered to be “influenced” by the stars. Now you know.