Who invented vaccinations

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A.� Nobody knows for sure, but the man who made them popular was Edward Jenner, an English doctor.< xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

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Q.� How

A.� The idea came from the East, where it had been known for centuries. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey, brought the idea back in 1721. The method there involved scratching the vein of a healthy person and pressing a small amount of matter, taken from a smallpox pustule of a person with a mild attack, into the wound.

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Q.� It worked

A.� Sometimes - although on occasions the patient contracted the full disease, with fatal results.

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Q.� So how did Jenner get involved

A.� In 1788, a smallpox epidemic swept through Gloucestershire, where Jenner, then 39, was a doctor. Over the years, Jenner had used the eastern method of inoculation and noticed that people who had previously been infected with cowpox - a disease infecting the teats of cows and also the hands of dairymaids - were unaffected by the smallpox inoculation. They did not even produce the symptoms of a mild attack of smallpox. He had also noted that when whole families succumbed to smallpox, cowpox victims had been unaffected and remained healthy.

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Q.� What exactly is smallpox

A.� A highly contagious virus - real name variola - characterised by high fever and a pink rash changing which goes scabby and causes pock scars. It first appeared in China and the Far East at least 2,000 years ago and killed the Pharaoh Ramses V 1157BC. It reached Europe in 710AD and travelled to America with Hernando Cortez in 1520. There, it killed 3.5 million Aztecs in the next two years. Smallpox reached plague proportions in the cities of 18th-Century Europe, where it killed five reigning European monarchs.

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Q.� And Jenner helped put an end to all this

A.� Yes. In 1796 he carried out an experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps. He made two cuts in the boy's arm and worked into them a small amount of cowpox pus. James developed of a slight fever but soon recovered. A few weeks later, Jenner repeated the inoculation, using smallpox matter, and the boy remained healthy. Jenner called this method vaccination, named after vaccinia, the medical name for cowpox.

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Q.� Jenner was hailed a medical hero

A.� Not a first. He continued with his experiments and reported his results to the Royal Society. Its members considered, however, that he should not risk his reputation by presenting something 'so at variance with established knowledge'. In 1798, however, Jenner privately published his work - An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae - and within a few years smallpox vaccination became widespread.

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Q.� And it was a success

A.� Yes. Cases of smallpox began to wane. In 1967, the United Nations' World Health Organisation (WHO) launched a worldwide vaccination campaign against smallpox. Twelve years later, after two years of no reported cases, WHO announced that the disease had been eradicated from the planet.

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Steve Cunningham