THE MOST INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE HISTORY OF VACCINATION.

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WE HAVE COLLECTED FOR YOU THE MOST INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE HISTORY OF VACCINATION.

The history of vaccine prevention is more than 220 years old. The development of vaccine prevention, the science of how to use vaccines, is directly related to the work of E. Jenner. It was he, who first proved that after the introduction of a weakened microbe into the human body, immunity to infection is formed. At the end of the 18th century, he publicly inoculated an 8-year-old boy with the contents of pustules from the hand of a woman who had contracted cowpox. After 1.5 months, the child was injected with material from a patient with smallpox – he did not get sick, after 5 months the infection was repeated – he did not get sick again. And so the experiment was repeated 23 more times!

That is why the term “vaccination” comes from the Latin word for “cow” (“vacca”). The first vaccination was for smallpox, and people were vaccinated with the vaccinia virus to prevent them from contracting smallpox.

SMALLPOX IS THE FIRST AND ONLY DISEASE THAT WAS ELIMINATED. SMALLPOX NOW EXISTS ONLY IN HIGH SECURITY LABORATORIES IN RUSSIA AND THE USA. VACCINATION TOOK THE IMPORTANT PLACE IN THIS.

Jonas Salk tested the first inactivated polio vaccine on himself and his children. The creator of the oral (live) polio vaccine, Albert Bruce Sabin, also tried the vaccine first on himself and his employees, and then on his daughters.

The first vaccination against the rabies virus was developed by Louis Pasteur together with Emile Roux. After a series of successful experiments in vaccinating dogs against rabies, on July 6, 1885, Pasteur vaccinated a human. This man was a 9-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who was bitten by a mad dog. Louis Pasteur gave the boy rabies vaccinations at the request of his mother, despite the lack of a medical license, i.e. the official right to treat people. Despite the hopeless prognosis, thanks to vaccination, the boy did not fall ill with rabies and, in gratitude for his salvation, worked all his life at the Pasteur Institute as a cleaner.

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov returned to Odessa in 1886 after a five-year trip to Italy and headed the newly organized Bacteriological Institute. The institute employees worked, in particular, on vaccines against chicken cholera and sheep anthrax. Newspapers and local doctors thirsty for sensations reproached Mechnikov for his lack of medical education – Mechnikov graduated ahead of schedule from the natural sciences department of the physics and mathematics faculty of Kharkov University. Unable to withstand the attacks in the press, Mechnikov left Russia in 1887. In Paris, Louis Pasteur offered Mechnikov to head a laboratory at the Pasteur Institute. Mechnikov worked there for the next 28 years, continuing his research on phagocytes and phagocytosis, discovering the role of cellular immunity. For his work on immunity, Mechnikov was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Paul Ehrlich.

At the end of the 18th century, European doctors became convinced that vaccinating with vaccinia provided a person with immunity from the more severe smallpox, which claimed more than a million lives every year. Soon they wanted to ship the vaccine to the New World, but at that time there were no refrigerators. In 1803, an expedition was launched under the leadership of the Spanish doctor Francisco Javier de Balmis. He used 22 orphan boys aged 8 to 10 years as a living chain: approximately every ten days, lymph was taken from the bubbles ripened on their hands and inoculated into the next boys. Thus, the vaccine was delivered to Mexico, Central and South America, and then with the help of a new batch of boys to the Philippines and China.

Once Louis Pasteur, who was conducting experiments on infecting birds with chicken cholera, decided to go on vacation and left his assistant in the laboratory. He forgot to perform the next vaccination for chickens and went on vacation himself. Upon returning, the assistant infected the chickens, which at first were weakened, but then unexpectedly recovered. Thanks to this oversight, Pasteur realized that weakened bacteria are the key to getting rid of the disease, since they give immunity to it, and became the founder of modern vaccination. Subsequently, he also created vaccines against anthrax and rabies.

Few people know about the African country of Rwanda. However, curiously, a larger percentage of children are vaccinated against polio in this country than in almost any developed country.

American microbiologist Maurice Ralph Hilleman developed 8 of the 14 standard vaccines in use today. It was he who invented vaccines against measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.

Here is such an interesting and eventful way of vaccination! And even more amazing discoveries await us!