In the 1700s, smallpox was very common, especially in crowded cities where infection spread easily. There was no cure. The only method developed at the time to deal with this was to hope for a mild infection to develop and then the patient to develop immunity. For this purpose, a small dose of smallpox pus, known as variolation, was deliberately transmitted to humans.
Then Edward Jenner heard rumors that the milkmaids were immune to smallpox due to infection by cowpox, and when one of his patients came in with the disease, he did a test. Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid, came to him with an active infection of cowpox that Jenner could use to deliberately infect some children. He also infected his 8-year-old son with cowpox before infecting him with smallpox; She proved the rumors to be true.
The world’s first vaccine has emerged after several trials that would probably be rejected by all ethics committees today.
They faced the challenges we faced in the COVID-19 pandemic, with much of the world battling the disease and in need of vaccines. But it would take more than a century for a global collaboration to transport vaccines to materialize. That’s why some countries tried to come up with their own solutions. Thus emerged an initiative to provide vaccines to other countries, the first international health program in history: The Balmis Expedition.
The Balmis Expedition: Vaccine delivery program with orphans
WikipediaIn 1803, King of Spain IV. Charles decided to send free vaccines to remote Spanish colonies in the Americas, along with the information and resources needed for the colonies to begin their own vaccination programs. He had been personally affected by smallpox and had lost several family members to the disease.
The problem was that the cowpox infection could only survive for a few days. By the time they got to America, the samples would be useless. The team suggested transporting the cows to the colonies, keeping their infections along the way, but this was rejected due to the difficulty of transporting the animals. Later, they found a more effective, though more ethical, way of carrying the disease: it would be carried by orphans.
At that time, it was possible to find a large number of orphaned children in the world; so finding the “source” was not a problem. The ship took 22 orphans aged 3-9 years and infected two children, keeping the infection alive. Then she infected two more children using the pus from their pustules. When they arrived at their destination, they paid local families to infect their children, keep the disease alive, and be ready to vaccinate people against the far more deadly smallpox.
While the discovery is certain to be seriously questionable ethically, the method of hiding the disease in orphans and then sending them on an extraordinarily volatile journey while sick has probably saved countless lives.
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