Seven things you probably didn’t know about vaccination
Roll up your sleeve and brace. Here are seven things we learned from Jake Yapp’s Everything We Ever Knew About Vaccinations. Don’t look. Sharp scratch...
1. The Chinese, in 1,000 AD, discovered that you could prevent smallpox by drying out other people’s smallpox scabs, grinding them up and shoving them up your nose. Suddenly a needle really doesn’t seem so bad, does it?
2. Smallpox vaccination was being used in Wales in 1600 AD. Syringes, you see, that’s what the Welsh ladies kept in their pointy hats.
3. Louis Pasteur, in 1879, produced some vaccine against chicken cholera when his assistant accidentally injected some old cholera into chickens. Oh come on, it’s easily done.
4. Maurice Hilleman developed vaccines for over 40 diseases including measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis and chickenpox. He’s saved the lives, it’s estimated, of over 8m people a year. But y’know, he’s not famous, not like if he’d been on X Factor.
5. Two official strains of smallpox still exist in Porton Down and the State Research Centre for Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia. So that’s alright then. Phew.
6. Before Edward Jenner discovered that cowpox could be used to vaccinate against smallpox, Benjamin Jesty, a Somerset farmer, had realised the same thing. But because he only told people in pubs and prefaced it with “Guess what?” nobody believed him.
7. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described living in Constantinople in 1721 and an old woman inoculating her son with the "best sort" of smallpox, transported in a nutshell. The best sort, note: none of your own brand smallpox.
