We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Investigations on the historical origin and evolution of the smallpox vaccine.
- Authors
Esparza, José; Nitsche, Andreas; Damaso, Clarissa R.
- Abstract
Smallpox, the disease that probably caused the highest death toll in human history, was declared eradicated in 1980 after an intensified campaign based on immunization with a vaccine initially developed by the British country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796. The classical story is that Jenner put to experimentation the folk story suggesting that milkmaids previously infected with a mild disease of cows (cowpox) were protected from smallpox. Vaccination was developed almost a hundred years before the germ theory of disease was formulated and, at that time, the nature of the immunizing agent was poorly understood. For more than 140 years it was widely accepted, in scientific and popular publications, that cowpox was the origin of the smallpox vaccine. However immunological research conducted in the 1930s revealed that cowpox and the smallpox vaccine (referred to as vaccinia) represented different viruses; an observation that many years later was confirmed by modern genomic analysis. Our collaborative group followed early clues suggesting that a related virus that infected horses (horsepox virus) could be the real origin of the smallpox vaccine. We initially analyzed the genomic sequence of a historic specimen of smallpox vaccine produced in Philadelphia in 1902 (Mulford 1902), providing the first scientific evidence of the suspected role of horsepox in the origin of the smallpox vaccine. More recently we reported that smallpox vaccines used during the 19th century in the United States, imported from Europe, included true horsepox viruses as well as vaccines representing intermediate strains between horsepox virus and modern vaccinia virus. We are now expanding our analysis to many other old smallpox vaccines, most of it still unpublished, and the available genomic sequence information suggests one or more evolutionary paths from a putative original smallpox vaccine based on the horsepox virus to the modern smallpox vaccine (vaccinia).
- Subjects
EUROPE; PHILADELPHIA (Pa.); SMALLPOX vaccines; IMMUNIZATION; VACCINIA disease vaccines
- Publication
Gaceta Médica de Caracas, 2020, Vol 128, pS88
- ISSN
0367-4762
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.47307/GMC.2020.128.s1.11