4/1/2023 0 Comments Kine box disease“You don’t need permission.”)ĭamaso said this new work shows that horsepox was at least sometimes used as the source material for smallpox vaccine.ĭavid Evans agreed. “When you have a cow, you don’t ask the cow,” Damaso said. Eventually cows became the preferred vehicle it was easier to sustain material by serially vaccinating a herd. (Vaccinated orphans and prisoners were shipped around the world to bring vaccine - in the form of pus and scabs - to the Americas and beyond. Damaso, an associate professor of virology and molecular biology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, has studied the history of smallpox vaccination, and in August she published a detailed review of how the vaccine was shared across the world in the 18th century. The closest hit was to horsepox the sequences were 99.7 percent similar.Ĭlarissa Damaso is also an author of this paper. The German scientists then compared the genetic sequence they retrieved from the Mulford vial to that of other known pox viruses. “This is material that has been at room temperature for more than 100 years,” Esparza noted. That they could speaks to the miracles of modern science. He asked scientists at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin if they could extract enough genetic material from the vial to figure out what vaccine virus Mulford used in its vaccine. The original wooden and glass containers that held the capillaries with the Mulford 1902 smallpox vaccine. It was produced in 1902 by a Philadelphia company, H.K. The new report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that horsepox viruses were used to vaccinate against smallpox at some point and in fact may have been the original tool used to protect against the dreaded disease.Ī semi-retired virologist who formerly worked for the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Esparza realized that he had an old smallpox vaccine vial a couple of years ago. Whether it is a virus that formerly infected some species of animals - rodents, maybe - or is something that evolved in laboratories through the deliberate mingling of pox viruses isn’t clear. With the evolution of science and the advanced tools now used to conduct it, it has become clear that vaccinia - the virus used in modern smallpox vaccines - is neither cowpox nor horsepox. He himself suggested it might have been horsepox, which can infect cows. Jenner was right the boy was protected.įor decades the practice of using scabs or pus from lesions on cows or on recently vaccinated people was how smallpox vaccination took place.īut it was never clear if Jenner’s original source material was cowpox. To test his theory, Jenner scraped pus from what were thought to be cowpox lesions on the hands of a milkmaid into the arm of an 8-year-old boy, and later exposed the boy to smallpox pus. He guessed it was because they sometimes caught cowpox, a related disease that only caused mild illness in people. Jenner, a physician and scientist, noticed that milkmaids generally didn’t develop smallpox, a disfiguring and sometimes deadly disease. Historians know a great deal about the origins of the first vaccine in general. What the dogs of Chernobyl can teach us about life at the edge Exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences Learn More
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