Word: smallpox
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...graduate of the School of Public Health, Foege is an epidemiologist who was involved in the campaign to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. He was later awarded an honorary degree from the University...
...hoping it won't come to that. He is not under any illusion that a successful antibody-based treatment will have the sweeping effect of the polio or measles or smallpox vaccines - essentially wiping out the diseases in treated populations. Instead, an ibalizumab-based therapy will be just one of many weapons against HIV, albeit a very powerful one. "At our first meeting on this, I said I have a strategy that I feel will work," Ho recalls. "It was truly my gut feeling...
...Diseases have been stamped out before. The last case of naturally occurring smallpox was in 1977, after the disease killed about 300 million people earlier in the century. But finding a cure for malaria has proven more elusive. Artemisinin, which is still considered the most effective malaria treatment today, is derived from sweet wormwood, an herb native to Asia. It's been used to fight the disease in China for more than 2,000 years, but it wasn't until 1965 that the cure was isolated and purified by the Chinese military after its soldiers started falling ill during...
...Given the risks of mass vaccination, the decision to launch a program can be fraught. According to Jacob Weisberg's book The Bush Tragedy, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were split in 2002 over whether to administer a nationwide smallpox vaccination program in the U.S. Cheney said that doing so would be a prudent counterterrorism step. Bush overruled him because the program could have resulted in dozens of deaths. (Statistical analysis has shown that the smallpox vaccine kills between one and two people per million inoculated.) Health officials don't always get the decision right...
...adverse reactions in vaccine recipients can make the already difficult job of convincing healthy people to receive inoculations even more challenging. For whatever reason, people tend to fear vaccines more than other medicines. This has been the case since the first vaccinations were given to prevent a spread of smallpox in England in the late 18th century. That vaccine used bovine ingredients (the word vaccine comes from the Latin word for cow, vacca) and people feared the injections would turn them into cows. (See the top 5 swine...