24 Facts About Smallpox That Turned Out to Be More Terrifying Than Any Apocalyptic Movie
In the history classes of the school, we were told that humanity was attacked by plague pandemics in the Middle Ages. However, few people remember that our ancestors had an equally dangerous disease: smallpox reduced their populations in Europe and Asia. It took man nearly 4,000 years to understand how the virus could be destroyed and ensure the safety of future generations.
Smallpox is a highly contagious viral infection with fatal consequences. The most obvious signs are fever, rashes everywhere, general weakness and many complications. However, not all complications have developed because about 30 to 50% of infected people have never survived long enough to cause such complications. To date, there is no specific method of treating this virus in humanity. In the event of a pandemic, doctors would therefore use antibiotics and immunomodulators.
Obviously, the situation was even worse in ancient times and in the Middle Ages: hundreds of thousands of people were infected with smallpox, died or had to live with terrible complications such as blindness and scars. Due to the long incubation period (10-14 days), patients have had time to infect everyone. And since nobody knew the simplest hygiene rules, the pandemic spread to different countries.
Humans infected with smallpox at 3000 ° C. Recently, archaeologists have discovered Ramses V's mummy with scars on the face. It turned out that the diseases of humanity were presented by camels. The animals were carrying a virus that eventually mutated and became lethal to humans.
This is how the Medieval artists imagined camels.
Compared to the smallpox pandemic, children's apocalyptic films are just a fairy tale. You do not even need close contacts to become infected: the virus spreads quickly through the air. Of course, a few thousand years ago, no one had ever heard of viruses. Ambassadors and traders have spread smallpox to the most remote places, unwittingly.
In the fifth century of our era, smallpox "traveled" Asian countries. He killed many people in China and Korea and a third of the Japanese population. The pandemic has also had a major impact on geopolitics: the main countries have collapsed and wars have begun. And doctors can only recommend a treatment with fish, rice and cooked onions.
According to Indian belief, there was a goddess of pox named Mariatale. She was shown as a beautiful young woman in red clothes. The woman was so angry that she was already very angry with her father and threw her gold necklace in his face. Bubbles appeared where the pearls touched the skin. The Indians even made sacrifices for the goddess, but they obviously had no meaning.
Indian smallpox goddess, Mariatale
The disease reached the Old World aboard merchant ships and camels by the Great Silk Road. From the 6th to the 19th century, about 400,000 people die each year. The virus has spread both in the homes of the poor and in the palaces of kings.
There was even a moment when almost no one in Europe had smallpox. In Germany, it was even said: "Few people avoid love and smallpox" (Of smallpox and love, only a few remain free). And in France, in the 17th century, when the police were looking for a criminal, a particularity could be: "No sign of smallpox." It was therefore easier to find a person who showed signs of smallpox than anyone else. had smallpox. t.
The medieval doctors treated the smallpox with red clothes: it was supposed that the infection was attracted by this color and left the body of the person. And the doctors certainly knew one thing: if a person had smallpox, she would never hav
Smallpox illustration, Japanese manuscript
In the 17th century, children were considered full members of the family when they survived smallpox. No one could guarantee that a child would survive. And parents could only watch and hope.
With smallpox, face powder has become very popular among women (and men). After the illness, people's faces were covered with terrible scars. Rich people have covered their face with powder to hide the signs of the disease. So there were very few of those beautiful princesses that we talk about in novels.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig of Beethoven, Maximilian Robespierre, Abraham Lincoln and other famous people had smallpox. On the portraits of these people are by no means the signs of smallpox to see because the artists have deliberately not shown. Although there was no Photoshop at the time, personalities always wanted to be beautiful.
The French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre: on the left his portrait and on the right the reconstruction of his face from his death mask.
How humans have found a way to tame and then destroy the virus
Doctors have honestly tried to fight against smallpox. In addition to obvious naive methods, such as trying to drive evil spirits, Chinese doctors invented the vaccine. This method is almost akin to a vaccine, the only difference being that a person was injected with an active strain of smallpox virus. And the process was really effective: people had not actually contracted such a serious case of the disease. However, the vaccine was more of a gamble: there was no way to predict how smallpox would affect individuals.
Edward Jenner, son of a village pastor, biologist, surgeon, and genius, discovered how to get rid of the pandemic. A dairy told Jenner that the workers would never have been infected with smallpox. The doctor began to monitor these farm workers and discovered that they had been infected with the virus, had a mild fever and were then immunized against smallpox. In this way, Jenner created a new type of vaccine (with some modifications) that saved people from the disease until the middle of the 20th century.
Edward Jenner performed the first vaccination against smallpox.
James Phipps, an 8-year-old orphan, was the first to receive the vaccine. As is often the case during major discoveries, the public and doctors did not think the new idea was feasible and said, "It makes no sense to inflict epidemics on humans."
In the early 19th century, however, people gradually recognized the importance of vaccination. Spanish sailors carried the vaccines to South and North America. As they crossed the Atlantic, they took orphans aboard their ships and injected them with the vaccines.
According to some sources, the Spaniards used smallpox as a biological weapon. Native Americans died because they were not immune to the virus.
Native Americans got sick after making contact with the Spanish conquistadors.
The governments of the major countries (Russia, Great Britain, Spain) have adopted special laws on vaccination. And after about 100 years, Europe has tamed smallpox.
In the 1950s there was virtually no case of smallpox in industrialized countries. Young doctors only saw it in textbooks. In Africa, Asia, India and South America, the virus has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. So the world has united against this common enemy. The United Nations has taken a decision regarding the mass vaccination of all humanity. It was the first time in the history of the world that doctors and scientists were destroying a virus with a vaccine.
But they made some mistakes:
In Moscow in 1959, a smallpox pandemic almost broke out. An artist from Moscow, Kokorekin, went to India, where he went to the cremation of a brahman. The artist returned to Moscow, but soon felt very bad and died in the hospital. When the doctors understood what the artist had brought to Moscow, they alerted the army and the intelligence services and inoculated the entire population of the city.
In 1977, Somali doctors caught the last time someone had contracted smallpox and wanted to let the world know that smallpox was completely destroyed. Scientists have locked smallpox in a laboratory.
The last person to die of smallpox was a woman from Birmingham. By the way, it's the second largest city in the UK. Janet Parker, 40, was working in a medical laboratory where the virus had filtered in 1978. 5,000 people in contact with Janet received the vaccine and no one else fell ill.
In 1980, the World Health Organization stated that smallpox had been completely destroyed. Since the 1970s-1980s, no smallpox vaccine has been administered. This means that the modern generation is not immune to smallpox
Janet Parker is the last recorded person to die of smallpox.
Today, the virus exists only in two laboratories: Vector (Russia) and CDC (USA, Maryland). Today, it is thought that smallpox can not be used as a biological weapon and that humanity has nothing to fear.
In 2014, 6 forgotten bottles were found on a campus of the University of Maryland. It turned out that the vials contained a perfectly viable poxvirus. The box was destroyed, but everyone was worried. Experts believe that such a situation could recur.
American doctors practice their actions in the event of a smallpox pandemic. The person in the bag is not dead: it's just an exercise.
The fight against the smallpox pandemic is an example of how the people of the world can unite and defeat an enemy that we can not even see. This disease has changed the world map and caused a lot of suffering and misery, but thanks to their existence, people have invented vaccines for many other viruses.