The History of Smallpox and the Vaccine

Smallpox is a horrendous disease and can be found through out history with the first recorded epidemic of it being around 1350 BC but evidence of it perhaps dating 6,000 years ago. During the 11th century a Buddhist nun began taking the scabs of infected people, would grind them up and have people, who had not had the smallpox or developed an immunity to it, inhale the powdered scabs. This first attempt at immunization was not perfect and resulted in the deaths of about 2% to 3% of the people who this treatment was given to. However, Smallpox has an overall death rate of about 30% so this was a tremendous increase in security against the disease. Later in history this became common practice in a few countries including China. In the late 1700's a man named Jenner began treating people with Cowpox, but his history has been under scrutiny.

Smallpox was not a disease on the American continent until it was discovered and brought here by explorers. It devastated many of the natives and many were wiped out completely. As slave trade began taking place, it worsened the impact on natives as in Africa, Smallpox was far more common.

In 1931 the first licensed vaccine for Smallpox was approved but was not used widespread until the 1960's and 1970's. By the time the vaccine, as is the history of most vaccines, the disease was already almost unheard of in the United States. In 1949 there was an outbreak that infected 8 people with 1 death. Most of the developed countries had already seen an end to Smallpox. From 1959 to 1967 the United States had virtually no cases of Smallpox and it had nearly diminished to nothing in Europe. The real push and focus in my opinion should have been the undeveloped countries to prevent potential spread to the countries that were already smallpox free, but this was not the case.

My personal opinion and thoughts are that like many other diseases, as we learned more about maintaining a clean environment, water treatments, antimicrobial cleaning agents like bleach and others, the instances of many diseases like Smallpox, Diphtheria, and many others seemed to have vanished or were on their way out long before modern vaccines. While modern vaccines are perhaps safer than older vaccines, they still take their toll due to toxic and carcinogeous ingredients that are required to make them safe. It is simply impossible to inject the human body with some of the most toxic chemicals and elements known to man without wreaking some type of potentially catastrophic effect on the individual and the overall population. If a disease can be eliminated by improving cleanliness then that would be preferable to toxifying the body out of a fear of something that can be controlled.

The greatest fear of smallpox today is biological warfare in which case it seems likely to me that the vaccine will be of little use. The efforts of biological warfare labs are to mutate the virus and create a strain that is resistant to the vaccines so should a war break out it is very likely that the vaccines will be useless other than to weaken the immune system and potentially harm the recipient of the vaccine.

http://dermatology.about.com/cs/smallpox/a/smallpoxhx.htm

http://www.smallpoxhistory.ucl.ac.uk/

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1200696

Disclaimer: This article, "The History of Smallpox and the Vaccine", is not intended to give medical advice. It is a call to educate yourself so that in making a decision where your child is concerned, you should take an active role in learning all you can from medical experts on both sides of the fence, then make an educated decision. we did not make an informed decision until one son got Leukemia and another developed Autism immediately after receiving his MMR vaccine. This has sent us on a quest to inform ourselves and others to seriously question what kind of toxic soups are being injected with the vaccines. Odds are if your child is injured by a vaccine, you have little or no recompense against the industry.