Imagine this: you are an average human being, content with traveling to work and returning home to your family every day. One day, you discover you have a fever and a perpetual headache; adding to the severe back pain you have been experiencing, you assume you have influenza. However, your suspicion is invalidated when scarlet lesions begin to appear on your face, hands, and your body. It dawns on you that you don’t have influenza, you have smallpox, and consequently you remember: smallpox does not have a cure.
Thankfully, this situation would never occur today due to the remarkable scientific discovery of the vaccination. In the years prior to the creation of the vaccination, some scientists had experimented with variolation, which was the …show more content…
Almost 100 years after Jenner, Louis Pasteur attempted to develop immunizations for other diseases aside from smallpox. Pasteur injected chickens with an attenuated form of cholera and then demonstrated how the chickens were immune to the fully virulent strain of cholera. This allowed to Pasteur to realize that exposure to weakened strains of a disease could cause immunity against that disease. After recognizing this, Pasteur attempted to create a vaccine for anthrax. Pasteur obtained cultures of the anthrax bacterium and then conducted an experiment involving farm animals; the results of which was the immunization of 70 animals. The success of his experiment attested that exposure to a weakened strain of a disease could lead to immunity. During Pasteur’s life, he was able to expand on Jenner’s work and provide explanations for aspects of vaccination that Jenner was not able to.
The impact of the vaccine has been unparalleled in history. In the past two hundred years, many vaccines have been created by applying Jenner and Pasteur’s work. Extraordinarily, atments before, now have vaccinations. The World Health Organization states that vaccinations save approximately 2.5 million lives every year from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and measles. Every day, scientists make progress in improving vaccines and creating new ones. Vaccinations have changed medicine by providing cures for previously terminal diseases and by saving millions of