Which scientist first used vaccination? Smallpox: inoculation and vaccination
In America (this disease has already been compared to Ebola), doctors were again forced to talk about the importance of vaccinations - the use of vaccines to develop immunity against dangerous diseases. But even now it is impossible to hide that the path to new vaccines is replete with coincidences and adjusted by human frailties and passions. This is happening now, this is how it happened before - Lenta.ru recalls little-known and scandalous episodes from the history of vaccination.
Harem secrets
Humanity's journey to vaccination began with smallpox. This disease has haunted people for many millennia - it was already in ancient Egypt and China. Smallpox causes fever, vomiting, and bone pain. The whole body is covered in a rash. Almost a third of patients die, and survivors are left with scars on the skin (pockmarks) for life. IN medieval Europe The incidence of smallpox became widespread.
However, even in ancient times they noticed that those who have had smallpox do not catch it again (or, at least, it brings them only a slight discomfort). It is unknown who first came up with the idea of rubbing it into a wound on the hand. healthy person smallpox pus from a ripe pustule of a patient - and how they managed to convince us to test this method (variolation, or inoculation) in action. But we came up with this in different places- China, India, West Africa, Siberia, Scandinavia. (In China, however, they preferred to dip a cotton ball in pus and then stick it into the nose).
But modern vaccination originated in the Caucasus. Circassian women performed variolation on their daughters when they were six months old - so that smallpox scars would not disfigure them already as girls. It is unclear how much of this was a health concern and how much of it was a way to add value to the girls who had been sold into Turkish and Persian harems for hundreds of years.
However, the slave trade with the Caucasus had one positive consequence for world medicine: by the end of the 17th century, the Istanbul Turks adopted their useful custom from the Circassians. Inoculation gave only two to three percent of deaths - ten times less than during the normal course of the disease!
But how did this method get to Europe? In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, daughter of a duke and a star of London high society, contracted smallpox. The illness spared her, but disfigured her face - the lady left London and went to Istanbul, where her husband was appointed ambassador.
Having learned about variolation from local women, in 1718, Wortley Montague persuaded the embassy doctor to vaccinate her five-year-old son Edward against smallpox (despite the objections of the priest, who was afraid of the “Mohammedan” procedure). The boy acquired immunity, and the British lady was determined to introduce a new medical technology in your home country.
Burn the witches, vaccinate the sick
In the same year, 1718, in America, a preacher (one of the ideologists of the Salem witch hunt) talked with his slave Onesimus about smallpox. The African showed a scar on his hand and told Mather about the operation that saved him from infection forever.
The preacher had a chance to convey his discovery to the masses in 1721, when a ship with sick sailors dropped anchor in Boston harbor. Mather gathered the doctors of Boston and advised them to immediately vaccinate the townspeople. All spring and summer he wrote treatises and letters, read sermons about the morality and safety of inoculation.
However, Mather's calls to fight witches were more successful than his preaching of vaccinations. The people doubted the harmlessness of the new remedy, and especially believers were outraged by the idea that man was interfering with the divine plan to infect the sinner with illness. Professional doctors they were indignant: some clergyman was meddling in the scientific (secular!) process of treatment with his savage experiments.
Among the doctors, Mather was able to convince only one - Zabdiel Boylston vaccinated his son and two slaves. After a successful outcome, he began to vaccinate Bostonians, turning to the help of African slaves who carried out variolation in their homeland.
Meanwhile, the epidemic was gaining momentum: by October, almost a third of Bostonians had fallen ill. Boulston and Mather vaccinated everyone they could persuade - but the townspeople blamed them for the uncontrolled spread of the epidemic. One night, a grenade flew through Mather's bedroom window. Fortunately, one of the halves of the bomb, which split into two parts, extinguished the fuse. Mather read from a piece of paper tied to the wick: “COTTON MASER, you damn dog; I’ll vaccinate you with this, here’s smallpox.”
Defending their method, Mather and Boylston compiled a remarkably accurate 18th-century medical statistics: According to their data, only two percent of those vaccinated died, while among other Bostonians the mortality rate was 14.8 percent.
Image: Mary Evans Picture Library / Globallookpress.com
Meanwhile, in England, Lady Montague vaccinated her daughter to prove to doctors the effectiveness of inoculation. After this, the king ordered clinical trials to be conducted on prisoners at Newgate Prison (the surviving volunteers were promised to be released). After a successful experience, doctors switched to orphans. When they also acquired immunity to smallpox, doctors climbed up the social ladder by vaccinating the daughters of the Prince of Wales.
Only then did inoculation begin to spread in Britain. But in Europe it was still considered the island madness of the British. It was only after the death of Louis XV from smallpox in 1774 that the monarch's grandson (the future Louis XVI) agreed to the procedure. Inoculation helped: the king’s life was ended not by smallpox, but by the guillotine.
Unknown milkmaids instead of Jenner
At the end of the same 18th century, more than effective remedy- vaccination. This, again, is the merit traditional medicine: the young doctor Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids in Gloucestershire almost never got smallpox. Observing cases of smallpox in humans and animals, Jenner gradually came to the idea that it was possible to artificially infect humans cowpox, and so save it from the natural one.
In 1796, Jenner inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with cowpox. When the boy recovered from the consequences, Jenner inoculated him with real smallpox - and Phipps did not get sick. However, the British scientific community was skeptical about Jenner's conclusions - recognition came to the physician only at the beginning of the 19th century. By the way, it is to him that we owe the term “vaccination” (vaccinia in Latin - cowpox). Nowadays a vaccine is called any medicine, giving the body immunity from disease: vaccines are usually obtained from grown in laboratory conditions viruses.
Jenner's story is told in all textbooks. But not everyone knows that he was not the first and not the only one to come up with the idea of vaccinating against cowpox. Five years before Jenner, this procedure was carried out by Peter Plett from Schleswig-Holstein (also after talking with milkmaids). He reported his experience to professors at the local university, but they ignored him. Plett died in obscurity in 1820 - now his name is known only to specialists.
But Plett was an educated man. Vaccination was invented by the most ordinary people: for example, in 1774, farmer Benjamin Jesty from Dorset inoculated his wife and children with cowpox (with the help sewing needle) - to protect them from the epidemic. Descendants learned about this from the inscription carved on Jesti’s grave. “He is a direct and honest person; he was the first (as far as is known) to inoculate cowpox, and who, thanks to great power spirit conducted an experiment on his wife and two sons in the year 1774.”
Francis Galton, “In science, credit goes to the person who convinces the world, not to the person who first comes up with a new idea.”
Large-scale anti-vaccination campaigns, which are being joined by more and more young parents, mass anti-vaccination hysteria in the media against the backdrop of occasional voices of vaccination advocates, prompted me to write a series of articles about vaccinations. And the first material is devoted to what has changed in the world with the advent of vaccines.
Pre-vaccine era: diphtheria
Opponents of vaccination, loudly trumpeting its “terrible” consequences, for some reason “forget to mention” the times when terrible epidemics raged in the world, fatal diseases. I will fill this gap and remind readers of the tragedies that unfolded in those years.
Diphtheria, which has been conveniently forgotten today, is a serious disease that is complicated by paralysis of the limbs, soft palate, vocal cords, respiratory tract. A person can die in unbearable pain, unable to breathe even a small breath of air. Fatal outcome awaits up to 20% of children and adults over 40 years of age and 5–10% of middle-aged people. In the 1920s, the diphtheria epidemic in America killed 13–15 thousand people a year, most of them children. In 1943, 1 million people in Europe suffered from diphtheria, of whom 50 thousand died.
In 1974, the World Health Organization launched an immunization program against diphtheria, the results of which were immediate. Epidemics became rare, and their rare outbreaks turned out to be nothing more than a consequence of doctors’ mistakes.
So, in the early 1990s in Russia, medical officials decided to revise the list of contraindications to vaccination against diphtheria that had existed since Soviet times - of course, with good intentions. It was significantly expanded, and the results of these intentions led... to the diphtheria epidemic in 1994. Then 39,703 people fell ill with diphtheria.
For comparison, in the quiet year of 1990, only 1,211 cases of the disease were recorded. But diphtheria is not the most terrible disease, which was brought under control with the help of vaccines.
The shadows will be pulled together with trembling tetanus...
A painful disease, the mortality rate from which can reach 50%... It is easy to become infected with it: the father of the singer of the revolution Mayakovsky pricked his finger with a needle and died of severe tetanus. Toxins produced by the bacteria Clostridium tetani are poisons that lead to tonic contractions masticatory muscles, cramps of facial muscles, and then to tension in the muscles of the back, limbs, pharynx, and abdomen. Due to strong muscle spasms Swallowing, defecation, urination, blood circulation and breathing are impaired or completely stopped. About 40% of patients over 60 years of age die in indescribable suffering. Young patients have a better chance of survival, however previous illness will remain one of the biggest nightmares of their lives.
Thanks to mass immunization, the risk of contracting tetanus has become hypothetical. Thus, in 2012, only 30–35 cases of tetanus were registered in Russia per year, and 12–14 of them had death. About 70% of cases are elderly people over 65 years of age who have not been vaccinated against tetanus.
Smallpox, which has sunk into oblivion
Another terrible disease that remains in the pre-vaccination past forever is smallpox. This viral infection easily transmitted by airborne droplets, collecting a rich harvest of victims. Few people today know and remember that at least every third patient with smallpox died. Overall coefficient The mortality rate for children under one year of age was 40–50%.
A rash covering almost the entire body is only one, aesthetic side of the disease. The same pockmarks appeared over time on the mucous membrane of the nose, oropharynx, larynx, as well as the respiratory tract, genitals, urethra and conjunctiva of the eye.
Then these rashes turned into erosions, and later signs of brain damage appeared: impaired consciousness, convulsions, delirium. Complications of smallpox include inflammation of the brain, pneumonia, sepsis. Patients who survived this disease were left with disfiguring numerous scars as a souvenir.
In the 18th century, smallpox was the leading cause of death in the world. Every year, 400 thousand Europeans died due to epidemics. And only the creation of a vaccine stopped this scourge. The beginning of the end of smallpox tragedies English doctor Edward Jenner. He noticed that milkmaids who had cowpox did not become infected with human smallpox. Yes, back in early XVIII century, the world's first vaccine against smallpox, which included the cowpox virus, which is not dangerous to humans.
Vaccination came to Russia after the death of Emperor Peter II from smallpox. The first to be vaccinated were Empress Catherine II and the future Emperor Paul I. Thus began the era of vaccination, which made it possible to completely defeat the disease that was claiming millions of lives. According to WHO, smallpox has been considered eradicated since 1978; since then, not a single case of the disease has been reported.
Thanks to mass immunization, smallpox can be kept under total control, and this is a huge achievement modern medicine. Which, of course, is not mentioned by anti-vaxxers. Yes, the reader will ask, but how do vaccines work in the human body?
Invisible but valuable work
Vaccinations teach the body to respond correctly to the pathogen. Killed or live but inactivated microbes stimulate the immune response without developing disease. As a result, the body produces antibodies to the pathogen antigens and forms a stable immunity to them.
Widespread vaccination, which began in the 20th century, not only eradicated smallpox. The prevalence of measles and mumps fell by 99% and whooping cough by 81%. We have almost forgotten about polio and mumps. Girls, becoming girls and women, no longer risk contracting “funny” rubella during pregnancy and losing their long-awaited baby because of this.
We have become so accustomed to the stability and achievements of modern medicine that we have begun to ignore them. And then the voices of those who, with eyes burning with righteous anger, burst into our lives and proclaimed... mortal danger vaccinations. Filled with tragic intonations, these voices call for protection from vaccinations as the most harmful substances with unpredictable consequences. What do these people base their theories on, how do they argue for the “danger” of vaccination, and how true are these arguments, I will tell you in the following articles.
Marina Pozdeeva
Photo thinkstockphotos.com
The creator of this vaccine, microbiologist Vladimir Khavkin, injected himself. Louis Pasteur's prediction began to come true: “One of my students will stop the plague.”
Pasteur said this when he was already dying, when he came to his institute for the last time. He was then shown under a microscope the causative agent of the plague - a bacterium that had just been discovered by his student Alexandre Yersin.
The third plague pandemic began: terrible disease escaped from a natural center in the center of Asia and attacked China, Russia and India. Pasteur’s youngest student, Russian citizen Vladimir Aaronovich Khavkin, had just returned from India. However, he was no longer a Russian even according to his papers. Khavkin did not visit the Russian embassy in time to renew his foreign passport. Yes, he was not particularly expected at home.
There he was considered a Narodnaya Volya member, politically unreliable. He was arrested three times and was under police supervision for 8 years. Without much regret, the Russian ambassador gave him letter of recommendation for the British government, which invited Haffkine to India to test his cholera vaccine. Also the first in the world.
Both Khavkin’s patron Ilya Mechnikov and Louis Pasteur himself doubted this vaccine. However, the result was excellent - 93% guaranteed protection. Believing that Khavkin was a wizard, the British called him again - this time to fight the plague. He was hired as a full-time biologist in the civil service and was promised British citizenship and a laboratory.
In fact, the Bombay laboratory medical college allocated with unprecedented generosity - an entire room. The staff includes one laboratory technician and three couriers. The experimental animals were rats, which sailors caught for pennies on ships coming from Europe. Simultaneously with Khavkin, several scientific centers developed an anti-plague vaccine in much more luxurious conditions. And yet the passportless emigrant outsmarted everyone.
He chose a path that others did not take: making a vaccine of the poison produced by plague microbes. This was faster than passing bacilli generation after generation through the bodies of thirty rabbits. There were no rabbits. The bacilli multiplied in meat broth. To give them something to cling to on the surface, Khavkin dropped a drop of fat into the broth. Microbes grabbed onto the greasy stain and grew down like a stalactite. Such “Haffkine stalactites” indicated that the bacteria were doing well. From time to time, the flasks with them were shaken, the bacilli sank, fat dripped onto the surface again, new microbes clung to it, and so on until the broth was saturated with the toxin.
Before injecting this poison into rats so that they would develop immunity to the plague, the flasks were heated to 60 degrees - such pasteurization killed the bacteria, preserving their toxin. The trial batch was prepared in just three months. The laboratory assistant fell ill with nervous breakdown, and Khavkin worked 14 hours a day: he was in a hurry, hundreds of people were dying around him every day. At the same time, he also lectured local medical students about the future vaccine. Apart from them, no one would have dared to get vaccinated even after the Russian microbiologist, on January 10, 1997, injected a quadruple dose of plague poison - 10 milliliters of solution - under his skin.
By the way, it was easier for Indian students to decide to get vaccinated because Khavkin came from Russia. The measures taken by the British colonialists to combat the plague aroused hatred among the natives. The head of the Bombay garrison, General Gatacre, acted illiterately, and no one gave him orders. The military took people with the plague to hospitals, and their families to concentration camps, so that they had reliable contact between the healthy and the already sick, who were still suffering. incubation period. The empty homes of the unfortunate captives were doused with carbolic acid, and rats with plague fleas scattered from there wherever they wanted, spreading the infection.
Mandvi district, inhabited by the poorest, suffered the most. But they did not want to be vaccinated. In vain did the Indian students tell them that the vaccine was made here and that its creator was not “Inglisi”, but “Rusi”. And this “Rus” is just as persecuted because he is a Jew, and openly says that the British treat the Indians as badly as the tsarist authorities treat his people. For the poor people in the slums of Mandvi, all whites looked alike. Only an influential person whom they absolutely trusted could encourage them to get vaccinated. And such a leader was found. He himself contacted Khavkin.
It was Aga Khan III, ruler of the invisible Ismaili empire, the 48th Imam of the great sect, guiding this Muslim community in anticipation of the appearance of the Messiah Mahdi. He was barely 20 at the time, but this young man knew five languages and was well versed in the sciences, so he could assess the capabilities of the vaccine from articles in medical periodicals. He had just gotten married, and for the wedding his subjects scattered from Mozambique to Indonesia presented him with gold coins, the total weight of which was equal to the weight of the 48th Imam himself. There was enough gold, but the British methods of fighting the plague worried him. If the colonialists drive into coffins all the inhabitants of the Mandvi quarter, among whom there were many Ismailis, and smash their homes into pieces, as they did in Karachi, where will the precious metal come from at the next weighing, in 5 years?
In addition, the Aga Khan had political plans. For his career he needed a feat. And he did it. At the request of the almighty Imam, Khavkin vaccinated him several times in front of crowds of Ismailis. Khavkin's laboratory moved from a small room to the luxurious Aga Khan villa, and the staff was expanded with community funds. It worked.
Immediately 11 thousand Ismailis were vaccinated against the plague. Now both the disease and the damned fighters against it avoided their homes. Seeing that the Aga Khan was “for the people,” the neighbors of the Ismailis began to convert to Islam, joining the ranks of the Shiite sect. At this point, Hindu leaders sensed competition and began to persuade their fellow believers to get vaccinated. And Khavkin was declared Mahatma. The Aga Khan got everything he wanted from this scientific experiment. Queen Victoria showered him with awards and introduced him to the Indian government. In Western India, populated predominantly by Muslims, the elite of the future independent Pakistan grew from the creatures of the Aga Khan. When this state gained sovereignty, the Aga Khan weighed himself again. But now it was not gold that was being poured onto the other side of the scale, but diamonds. 95 kilograms of diamonds.
Khavkin realized back in 1897 who he was dealing with. He had his own interest in the Aga Khan. Vladimir Aaronovich proposed to the imam only a project for the liberation of Jews from the rule of other peoples. According to his plan, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II - Palestine then belonged to the Ottoman Empire - allowed Jews to buy land around Jerusalem. A compact Jewish autonomy was formed, which, out of gratitude, would become the support of the Sultan’s power in the troubled Arab East.
Interestingly, the Ismaili leader actually discussed this plan with Abdul Hamid. He flatly refused. Aga Khan III lived another 60 years and repeated more than once that among all the mistakes of the last ruler of the Ottoman Empire, this was the worst.
Vladimir Aaronovich Khavkin (1860-1930) at the height of his career, in 1896. He had just defeated cholera in India, personally vaccinating 42 thousand people. Queen Victoria has already included him in the list of awards dedicated to her upcoming birthday: Khafkin will be awarded British citizenship and the title of Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire.
Winter 1896-1897. Bombay, an open crematorium - the so-called funeral ghat, where Hindus continuously burn the bodies of hundreds of victims of the plague epidemic. The body is placed on logs placed between four steel bars. After combustion, the ashes are thrown into the sea. On the left is a stretcher with the newly delivered body of another deceased.
1897, Karachi, Western India (now Pakistan). Demolition of houses of those who died from the plague. Such a destruction did not produce any real sanitary and epidemiological results, because the plague infection does not nest in the house; its carriers are animals, primarily rodents. But it looked impressive, and the authorities got the feeling that “the situation is under control” and “measures have been taken.”
Top left - Major General William Forbes Gatacre (1843-1906), commander of the Bombay garrison and head of the Plague Committee established on 5 March 1897. Was endowed with dictatorial powers, developed vigorous activity. Gatacre believed that it was possible to overcome the plague without the help of doctors, through organizational measures alone. Every day he personally went around Bombay, removing those sick with the plague in order to isolate them in the hospital. Relatives of the sick were taken to special camps (where they languished from heat and hunger), and their homes were filled with carbolic acid for disinfection. The brutal, senseless measures sparked civil disobedience, an armed uprising and a Bombay dock strike. On June 30, 1897, the general, under a plausible pretext, was transferred to another position with a promotion. During the Boer War he commanded a division, which was shamefully defeated at the Battle of Stromberg.
Top right is the spiritual leader of the Ismailis, the 48th Imam of their community, Aga Khan III (1877-1957) in 1898, during a trip to Europe. Played a key role in mass vaccination, convincing the people of Bombay to trust Haffkin and his assistants. Queen Victoria appreciated the services of Aga Khan III in the fight against famine and plague: he was given an audience and awarded the title of Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire. One of the richest and influential people world, the actual creator of Pakistan as independent state West Indian Muslims, in 1937 chairman of the “world government” - the League of Nations.
Bottom left - Vladimir Khavkin vaccinates children against cholera. The photo was taken in early 1896 in Bengal, where Khafkin fell ill with malaria.
Bottom right - Khavkin, director of the Plague Research Laboratory (since 1925 this research institution called the Khafkin Institute) at the end of 1902 or beginning of 1903. Its employees: British military doctors assigned to the laboratory, Indian doctors, and administrators.
Haffkine sits with a white pith helmet in his left hand, behind him standing third from left is the superintendent - the officer responsible for the laboratory to the armed forces - Major William Barney Bannerman (1859-1924). He is ready to play the role of Judas. Due to Bannerman's incompetence, he could not be trusted with any manipulation more complicated than an injection. Bannerman intrigued against Khavkin in every possible way. Using medical error during vaccination in Punjab on October 30, 1902 (the cork of a bottle of vaccine fell to the ground and 19 people died of tetanus), he achieved the removal of the director from the leadership of the laboratory and the actual expulsion of Khafkine from India for several years.
Photo: Dr Maitland Gibson (seated) right hand from Khavkin).
The two bottom photographs are in the collection of the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.
Smallpox was first diagnosed more than 3,000 years ago in Ancient India and Egypt. Long time this disease was one of the most terrible and merciless. Numerous epidemics covering entire continents claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. History shows that in the 18th century Europe lost 25% of its adult population and 55% of its children every year. And only at the end of the 20th century World Organization Public health was officially recognized as the complete eradication of smallpox in developed countries.
Invention of the vaccine
Victory over this, as well as a number of other equally deadly diseases, became possible thanks to the invention of the vaccination method. The vaccine was first created by the English doctor Edward Jenner. The idea of vaccinating against the causative agent of cowpox came to the young doctor during a conversation with a milkmaid, whose hands were covered with a characteristic rash. When asked if the peasant woman was sick, she answered in the negative, confirming that she had already suffered from cowpox earlier. Then Jenger remembered that among his patients, even at the peak of the epidemic, there were no people of this profession.
For many years The doctor was collecting information confirming the protective properties of cowpox in relation to natural pox. In May 1796, Jenner decided to conduct a practical experiment. He inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with the lymph of a smallpox pustule from a person infected with cowpox, and a little later with the contents of the pustule of another patient. This time the smallpox pathogen was present in it, but the boy did not become infected.
After repeating the experiment several times, in 1798 Jenner published scientific report regarding the possibility of preventing the development of the disease. The new technique received the support of medical luminaries, and in the same year vaccination was carried out among the soldiers of the British army and sailors of the navy. Napoleon himself, despite the confrontation between the English and French crowns at that time, ordered a gold medal to be made in honor of greatest discovery, which subsequently saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
The global significance of Jenner's discovery
The first vaccination against smallpox in Russia was made in 1801. In 1805, vaccination was forcibly introduced in France. Jenner's discovery made it possible effective prevention hepatitis B, rubella, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio. In 2007, the first ever cancer vaccine was developed in the United States, with the help of which scientists managed to cope with the human papillomavirus.
Infectious diseases have plagued humanity throughout history. Taking a huge number of lives, they decided the destinies of people and states. Spreading with enormous speed, they decided the outcome of battles and historical events. Thus, the first plague epidemic described in the chronicles destroyed most of the population Ancient Greece and Rome. Smallpox, brought to America in 1521 on one of the Spanish ships, claimed the lives of more than 3.5 million Indians. As a result of the Spanish Flu pandemic, more than 40 million people died over the years, which is 5 times higher than the losses during the First World War.
Looking for protection from infectious diseases people have tried a lot - from spells and incantations to disinfectants and quarantine measures. However, it was only with the advent of vaccines that new era fight against infections.
Even in ancient times, people noticed that a person who had once suffered from smallpox was not afraid of repeated contact with the disease. In the 11th century, Chinese doctors inserted smallpox scabs into the nostrils. At the beginning of the 18th century, protection against smallpox was carried out by rubbing liquid from skin blisters. Among those who decided on this method of protection against smallpox were Catherine II and her son Paul, french king Louis XV. In the 18th century, Edward Jenner was the first doctor to vaccinate people with cowpox to protect them from smallpox. In 1885, Louis Pasteur, for the first time in history, vaccinated against rabies a bitten animal. mad dog boy. Instead of imminent death, this child remained alive.
In 1892, a cholera epidemic swept through Russia and Europe. In Russia, 300 thousand people died from cholera per year. A Russian physician who worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris managed to produce a drug, the administration of which reliably protected against the disease. Khavkin tested the vaccine on himself and on volunteers. With mass vaccination, the incidence and mortality from cholera among vaccinated people decreased tenfold. He also created a vaccine against plague, which was successfully used during epidemics.
The vaccine against tuberculosis was created by French scientists in 1919. Mass vaccination of newborn children against tuberculosis was started in France only in 1924, and in the USSR such immunization was introduced only in 1925. Vaccination has significantly reduced the incidence of tuberculosis among children.
At the same time, a vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough was created. Vaccination against diphtheria began in 1923, against whooping cough in 1926, and against tetanus in 1927.
The need to create protection against measles was due to the fact that this infection was one of the most common until the 60s of the last century. In the absence of vaccination, almost the entire child population under the age of 3 suffered from measles, and more than 2.5 million children died annually. Almost every person has had measles during their lifetime. The first vaccine was created in the USA in 1963; it appeared in the Soviet Union in 1968. Since then, the incidence has decreased by two thousand times.
Today at medical practice More than 100 different vaccines are used to protect people from forty years unnecessary infections. Vaccination, which saved humanity from epidemics of smallpox, plague, and diphtheria, is today rightfully recognized as the most in an efficient way fight infection. Mass immunization not only eliminated many dangerous epidemics, but also reduced mortality and disability. If you don't vaccinate, infections will start again and people will die from them. In the absence of vaccination against measles, diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, polio, out of 90 million children born annually, up to 5 million died from vaccine-regulated infections and the same number became disabled (i.e., more than 10% of children). More than 1 million children died annually from neonatal tetanus, and 0.5-1 million children from whooping cough. Among children under 5 years of age, up to 60 and 30 thousand children died annually from diphtheria and tuberculosis, respectively.
After introduction routine vaccination in a number of countries there have been no cases of diphtheria for many years, polio has been eradicated throughout the Western Hemisphere, in Europe, the incidence of measles is sporadic.
Indicative: Epidemic paralytic poliomyelitis in Chechnya began at the end of May 1995 and ended in November of the same year. The normalization of the situation is associated with the massive use of the vaccine on the territory of the republic in 1995. The outbreak of polio in Chechnya was preceded by a complete cessation of vaccine prevention, which lasted 3 years. This indicates that disruption of routine immunization over several years leads to the development of epidemics.
IN developing countries, where there are not enough funds for mass vaccination against tetanus infection, the mortality rate is very high. Every year, 128,000 children around the world die from tetanus before reaching their first birthday. It kills 30,000 mothers within a week of giving birth. Tetanus kills 95 people out of 100 cases. In Russia, fortunately, such a problem does not exist, since children under one year old and adults are required to be vaccinated.
IN lately a lot of campaigns have appeared aimed at belittling the role preventive vaccinations against infectious diseases. It is impossible not to note the negative role of the media in promoting the anti-vaccination program, as well as the participation in it of people who are often incompetent in this matter. By distorting the facts, the distributors of this propaganda convince the population that the harm from vaccinations many times exceeds their benefits. But reality confirms the opposite.
Unfortunately, cases of parents refusing all vaccinations for their children have begun to appear. These parents do not understand the danger they are exposing their children to, who are completely defenseless against infections. Good immunity, the vitamins used will not be able to help such children in a real encounter with the causative agent of a serious disease. In these situations, parents are fully responsible for the health and life of their child.
Statement that "there is no evidence that vaccinations have helped humanity defeat certain dangerous diseases" infectious diseases", is not true. Global Research in various countries the world obviously confirm that the introduction of vaccine prevention has led to sharp decline or complete elimination of many diseases.
Chief specialist - department expert
sanitary supervision and epidemiological safety
