Vaccination

Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 7 related

1. Story
2. The deliberate induction of immunity by exposure to an attenuated, killed or antigenically related agent. Edward Jenner's 1796 demonstration that cowpox protected against smallpox gave the technique its name and its first practical form, but the transformation of mortality came much later, with the twentieth-century childhood schedules against diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, measles and, latterly, pneumococcus, rotavirus and Haemophilus influenzae type b. Vaccination is the only human intervention that has ever driven a pathogen to extinction in the wild: smallpox, declared eradicated in 1980, is the sole complete case, and rinderpest in cattle the sole veterinary one. Its contribution to life expectancy is concentrated almost entirely in the first five years of life, which is precisely why it moved the headline statistic so far while leaving the age at which old people die essentially untouched.
3. Knowledge
4. Vaccination
5. Edward Jenner
6. Connections
7. The rise in life expectancy at birth
8. Edward Jenner
9. Jenner inoculates James Phipps with cowpox
10. The last naturally acquired smallpox case begins, at Marka
11. The World Health Assembly declares smallpox eradicated
12. Vaccination
13. Jenner inoculates James Phipps with cowpox
14. Evidence
15. Supports the eradication of smallpox, its declaration date and the identification of the last naturally acquired case at Marka, Somalia, in October 1977. V55 verification basis: neither the report nor the resolution text was retrieved in this session.