![]() ![]() People can lose confidence in a vaccine for a number of reasons. In several countries, reductions in the use of some vaccines have been followed by increases in the number of cases of potentially lethal diseases, as herd immunity begins to break down. Herd immunity is crucial for protecting people who cannot be vaccinated, such as babies and people with compromised or ineffective immune systems. When a high percentage of the population is protected through vaccination, it becomes difficult for a disease to spread because there are so few susceptible people left to infect. Vaccines don’t treat a disease, but prevent it from happening by stimulating the host to produce their own immunity, which can last for years. This is enough to treat the disease if you already have it, but it doesn’t prevent you from getting it again. Like vaccines, there are specific antitoxins for specific diseases, and the same technique is used for manufacturing treatments for other toxins such as snake venom.īecause antitoxins are not manufactured in the patient’s own blood, their effect only lasts a few weeks. ![]() They found that the serum cured the sick animals of the disease.Īntitoxins are made by collecting and purifying serum from animals (usually horses) inoculated with a non-lethal dose of disease toxin. They then isolated a serum from the blood of the immunised animals and used it to treat guinea pigs that already had diphtheria. Thanks to a global eradication programme of mass vaccination, the entire world population was officially free of this life-threatening disease by 1979.Ī bottle of diphtheria antitoxin developed by Emil Adolf Behring in 1891.Īntitoxins were developed by two researchers, Shibasaburo Kitasato (1852-1931) and Emil von Behring (1854-1917), who inoculated guinea pigs against diphtheria so they were immune to the disease. ![]() Today people can get vaccines against a whole host of infectious diseases, but smallpox is not one of them. Despite some opposition, vaccination soon replaced the riskier variolation and in 1853, 30 years after Jenner’s death, smallpox vaccination was a standard practice for preventing smallpox. He called the procedure vaccination after the Latin word for cow (vacca). Jenner published his findings in a short treatise. Six weeks later, Jenner inoculated young James with smallpox matter and the boy showed no signs of the disease. James developed a scab and experienced some soreness and mild fever for a day. In 1796 he took some matter from a cowpox pustule on the hand of milkmaid Sarah Nelmes and injected it into the arm of a young boy called James Phipps. Jenner decided to test the effectiveness of this practice. The hand of Sarah Nelmes infected with the cowpox. Image source for Drawing of Sarah Nemes' hand infected with cowpox ![]()
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