Michael Kinch
Michael Kinch is the author of Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity.
From his NPR interview with Susan Brink:
The first attempts to control smallpox go back at least 1,000 years and didn't involve vaccines. Can you describe those attempts?--Marshal Zeringue
Smallpox was probably killing a half a million people a year in Europe alone. The medical community had adopted a practice called nasal insufflation. You could take a little bit of the material from a smallpox scab, turn it into a powder and have a child snort it into the nose. Or you could intentionally scrape the skin and put material from a smallpox pustule under the skin of a healthy individual. That was called variolation. Those procedures caused smallpox, and people got sick. But far fewer of them died because most people would get a less virulent form of disease than if they were infected through exposure to a smallpox patient. Those who survived were then immune to smallpox.
How do you suppose people even thought of doing those disgusting things with scabs and pus?
You have to make assumptions. Maybe someone who was caring for a person with smallpox got a cut, and the cut got infected with pus from the patient. Then the caretaker noticed that afterward, they were immune to smallpox infection.
Variolation and nasal insufflation worked reasonably well, but they were not vaccines. What is a vaccine?
A vaccine is...[read on]
