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Welcome to World Immunization Week
With global numbers reaching a staggering 145+ million cases and 3+ million deaths from Covid-19, April 24 marks the start of United Nation’s tenth observance of World Immunization week. The theme this year is “vaccines bring us closer”
Immunizing people against a number of diseases is a well-established protocol recognized and recommended by the WHO and other medical agencies. However, it remains a matter of contention for a number of people, even in the face of this devastating Covid-19 pandemic.
In 1796, Edward Jenner, a country doctor in Gloucestershire, carried out his now famous experiment that led to a breakthrough in immunization against smallpox. Jenner had used the pus from a milkmaid infected with cowpox, and applied it to an incision on a child’s arm, which subsequently made the boy immune to smallpox. However, according to several sources, variolation — a method to immunize an individual against the smallpox virus (Variola), that involves taking material from an infected individual and applying it to an uninfected individual — was well established in Asia and the Middle East, long before that.
About 100 years after Jenner, Louis Pasteur made a significant modification in vaccines when he developed one against rabies: whereas Jenner had triggered protection to smallpox using live virus from the pus of a person infected…
