Smallpox was a devastating illness, but it was also vulnerable to human ingenuity because:
1. It only infected people...it couldn't hide in animals.
2. It's a DNA virus, which makes its genome much more stable, and its mutation rate slower.
3. It was very clear when someone had smallpox.
1. It only infected people...it couldn't hide in animals.
2. It's a DNA virus, which makes its genome much more stable, and its mutation rate slower.
3. It was very clear when someone had smallpox.
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Reading that made me very happy
It would be WONDERFUL if rabies could be eradicated for raccoons.
Back in the 1980s they trapped the raccoon & vaccinated w/ a needle. Much less efficient - but it was only for a 1-mile wide corridor on the southern edge of the C&D Canal.
https://scishow-tangents.simplecast.com/episodes/heads?t=26m25s
1/2
2/2
I have the sunburst scars on my shoulder to prove it. I'm not sure why three. A guess is that I got one in my hometown, one at our port of exit, and one at landing in Canada.
Simplified, it was covering a live animal in cuts, infecting it, restraining it to fester, collecting the pus, putting it inside people.
I'm a first generation Canadian. My parents emigrated from Scotland in the late 1960s. I've been back and forth enough to have heard a fair bit of lament about the demise of the Empire and its "civilizing" of the "natives" across the globe 🙄😬
It's not a Nasty take it doesn't perpetuate any racism.
You're uncomfortable with it, because your ancestors did those actions did those actions. 🤣
I call out all crimes against humanity, old and new.
My ancestors didn't, they immigrated later and not from Spain or England. That's true for most Americans.
Encourage, support and model mask-wearing. Encourage institutional clean air.
The silence of influential people is causing extreme harm to those of us who can't afford multiple infections (and that's becoming most of us).
5. It usually required close contact to spread, meaning you could vaccinate around outbreaks to end them.
6. It's slower mutation rate meant vaccination (or infection) provided life-long immunity.
I do think that we will eventually find a way to end their impact on people, but probably not in my lifetime.
But it’ll be at least 120 years before it is irrelevant on its own.
Flu has other sources in the wild. It’ll always be whack-a-mole, and it’ll always be with us.
Our inability to eradicate COVID is definitely a problem with the physical world and not just a problem of human behavior.
Not saying we shouldn't do that; just that we should understand the impact.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/12/flu-vaccine.html
18-29 year olds who haven't gotten a 3rd mumps shot are more vulnerable to the mumps than 29+ who've had a booster.
If the loss in immunity was due to viral evolution (divergence between formulation and current strain) you could not get back immunity.
A story from April 2019 about how durable or not immunity from vaccines are and how much or little we understand:
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-long-do-vaccines-last-surprising-answers-may-help-protect-people-longer
A quick story from 2023 summarizing a review of waning COVID immunity:
https://time.com/6276552/covid-19-vaccine-immunity-wanes/
The greater mission is to stop new emerging viruses from becoming pandemics.
I doubt we've learned our lesson either.
May Public Health, even if only as a concept, survive the next four years.
8. We could later just upgrade variolation with cowpox as a "vaccine"
It's why they should have just come up with a similar analogue for COVID, instead of the cards people have lost by now.
I do wonder why we don't have a more comfortable/safer vaccine yet, given that it's literally the first one we had.
Okay, that's pretty obvious actually.
https://www.britannica.com/science/pox-disease
That gets attention, and as any good disease knows, attention brings interest and the death march of research dimes.
COVID-19 persists because people assume (often wrongly) they’ll be OK.
I'd read it.
We also used its close cousin Cow Pox to vaccinate against Smallpox. The first vaccination, in fact vacca means cow.
This worked in our favor two ways-- it slowed the spread and then gave us the science of immunology.
and people not wanting to get vaccinated because they believe that vaccines are bots filled with neurotoxin so that you are brainwashed.
🤷♀️