Suffering with two dissimilar diseases
Dinesh Kumar Jain in Homeopathy, 2022
Hahnemann concluded that cowpox and smallpox both prevent the development of one other. Both diseases have similar symptomatology. So Hahnemann said that one disease homeopathically cured other diseases. Hahnemann gave emphasis on similar symptomatology, but what was the truth? It was not the similarity in symptomatology of cowpox and smallpox, which cured each other. It was the immunological and serological similarity of both types of viruses. Smallpox is due to variola virus. Cowpox is also a viral disease. By knowledge of pathology, we know, “Cowpox virus resembles that of smallpox morphologically and immunologically and the histological changes in the skin at the site of vaccination are essentially identical with those of smallpox” (Pinkerton, 1971, p. 394).
Smallpox
Scott M. Jackson in Skin Disease and the History of Dermatology, 2023
Enter Edward Jenner (1749–1823). Jenner was an English physician from Gloucestershire who once apprenticed under the great English surgeon John Hunter. He had diverse interests in such fields as zoology (he studied and published research on the cuckoo bird), geology, poetry, and hot air balloons. According to the oft-repeated legend, Jenner's contributions to the history of smallpox began with a conversation between a 13-year-old Jenner and a milkmaid who told him that she could not get smallpox because she had had cowpox. Cowpox was an ulcerative disease of cow udders that caused blisters, pustules, and ulcers of the hand and arm, along with swollen glands and fever, resulting from direct contact with the cow's infected parts. Because milkmaids were known for their beauty and flawless complexion, Jenner subsequently got the idea to variolate a person with cowpox in order to prevent smallpox. The term he used for this process is vaccination, a word that derives from the Latin vacca, meaning cow. The practice of vaccination was preferable to variolation because it was much safer and could not trigger an outbreak of smallpox.
The Milkmaid's Legacy
Norman Begg in The Remarkable Story of Vaccines, 2023
Variolation did provide some immunity to smallpox, but it didn’t stop the spread of the disease, as a variolated person could pass the disease onto others. It was also a highly dangerous procedure, as it could produce full-blown smallpox – two to three percent of people who were variolated died of the disease. No-one was able to escape smallpox – with one exception. Milkmaids seemed to be immune to smallpox. When an epidemic of smallpox arrived, they miraculously survived – either not catching it all, or having a very mild illness. There are numerous references in art and literature to “the beautiful milkmaid”, their skin unblemished by smallpox scars. It was believed that they developed their immunity from catching cowpox while milking their herds. Cowpox is similar to smallpox, but much less severe. It seemed that once exposed to cowpox, the maids were immune to its more unpleasant cousin, smallpox. In 1774, Benjamin Jesty, a farmer from Dorset, decided to protect his family during a smallpox epidemic. He took some pus from the udders of one of his cows that had cowpox, and, using one of his wife’s stocking needles, injected his wife and two children. None of them caught smallpox. Jesty wanted to protect his family, but unlike Jenner, he had no interest in the science behind what he had done, and his experiment was never published. He suffered a great deal of abuse from the local community, forcing him and his family to flee their home; it was only thirty years later that his contribution would be acknowledged by the quirkily named Original Vaccine Pock Institute, another learned society.
A Belgian student with black eschars
Published in Acta Clinica Belgica, 2023
Astrid Van Reempts, Liesbet De Meester, Koen Blot, Ann-Sophie Candaele, Hilde Beele, Jo Van Dorpe, Diana Huis in ‘t Veld
Human cowpox is a rare viral zoonosis. Cowpox virus is a member of the Orthopoxvirus genus, like the variola (smallpox) virus which was globally eradicated in 1980 by mass vaccination. Cowpox virus is endemic in wildlife in Europe and the adjacent parts of Asia. Despite the name, the asymptomatic natural reservoir hosts are wild rodents, especially bank voles and wood mice [1–3]. Historically, the name of the cowpox virus derives from the fact that animal to human transmission of this virus was observed in dairy maids who had direct contact with lesions on teats of infected cows, although infections in cows are not common [3]. Its resemblance to the mild form of smallpox and the observation that dairy farmers were immune to smallpox, inspired the English physician Edward Jenner to create the smallpox vaccine. The word ‘vaccination’, mentioned for the first time by Jenner in 1796, is derived from ‘vaccinus’ a Latin adjective, meaning ‘of or from the cow’ [4].
Preclinical developments in the delivery of protein antigens for vaccination
Published in Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery, 2023
Dylan A. Hendy, Alex Haven, Eric M. Bachelder, Kristy M. Ainslie
From simple beginnings of the administration of vaccinia to protect against cowpox, there has been an explosion in the development of new vaccine platforms. While attenuated and inactivated vaccines have shown clinical success, there is increasing public concern related to the safety of these types of vaccines. Due to this, the development of subunit vaccines is of great interest; however, subunit vaccines introduce many potential barriers to clinical translation. For example, subunit antigens are often not immunogenic enough on their own and require the delivery of immunopotentiating adjuvants. Currently, alum is a commonly used FDA-approved adjuvant that is found in many clinically available vaccines. However, alum falls short in that is does not promote a balanced Th1/Th2 response that is desired for increased efficacy. Due to this, there has been application of other adjuvants such as MPL, CpG, and QS-21 that produce a better Th1 response.
Modern vaccine strategies for emerging zoonotic viruses
Published in Expert Review of Vaccines, 2022
Atif Ahmed, Muhammad Safdar, Samran Sardar, Sahar Yousaf, Fiza Farooq, Ali Raza, Muhammad Shahid, Kausar Malik, Samia Afzal
The concept of vaccination had initiated during the 12th century when people used pustule liquid and skin lesions to produce immunity in the patient, but few patients got activation of immune responses [11,12]. The major issue with these primitive vaccines was extremely poor safety profiles, and many patients develop diseases from these inoculations [13]. Edward Jenner’s experiment to treat smallpox with cowpox lesions began an era of vaccinology; however, significant work was seen at the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century when Pasteur and Koch do significant achievements in the field of vaccinology by developing vaccines against rabies, tuberculosis, pertussis, typhoid, and diphtheria [14]. They develop attenuated and killed/inactivated vaccines and treated many humans and animals. The attenuated vaccine produces long-term immunity with the production of a vigorous immune response both humoral and cell-mediated [15]. Similarly, killed vaccines have ease of production and development of protective immune responses in the host [9]. Later, few scientists studied the side effects of attenuated and inactivated vaccines. Apart from the robust immune response by attenuated vaccines, reversion to virulence is a serious issue [16,17]. However, the killed vaccine has good safety but stimulates low levels and short-term immunity [9]. The first generation of vaccine had improved from contaminated lesions to a well-developed vaccine at that time, but still, no progress in the viral vaccine had occurred.
Related Knowledge Centers
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