Word: cowpox
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...ever since Edward Jenner, a country doctor in England, inoculated his son and a handful of other children against smallpox in 1796 by exposing them to cowpox pus, things have been tougher on humans' most unwelcome intruders. In the past century, vaccines against diphtheria, polio, pertussis, measles, mumps and rubella, not to mention the more recent additions of hepatitis B and chicken pox, have wired humans with powerful immune sentries to ward off uninvited invasions. And thanks to state laws requiring vaccinations for youngsters enrolling in kindergarten, the U.S. currently enjoys the highest immunization rate ever; 77% of children embarking...
...seldom see them on the cover of Prevention Magazine, but vaccines are the great prevention success story of modern medicine. They are not perceived as new or sexy; they have been around since the days of George Washington, when Edward Jenner first scraped the scabs from milkmaids infected with cowpox to inoculate people against smallpox. By the end of the 20th century, vaccines had conquered many of man's most dreaded plagues, eliminating smallpox and all but wiping out mumps, measles, rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio, at least in the developed world. Vaccines had done their work so well...
...marvels molecular biologist Nicholas Deacon of Australia's Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research, "but the prediction is that they never will." Deacon speculates that this "wimpy" HIV may even be a natural inoculant that protects its carriers against more virulent strains of the virus, much as infection with cowpox warded off smallpox in 18th century milkmaids...
There are many precedents for studying people with natural immunity in order to devise vaccines. In fact, the famous vaccine developed by England's Edward Jenner in 1796 resulted from his observation that milkmaids who had gone through bouts of cowpox enjoyed natural protection against the much deadlier smallpox. Plummer hopes his HIV-free prostitutes can play the same role today that Jenner's clear-skinned milkmaids did nearly two centuries...
...known that milkmaids sometimes caught a disease from the cows, called "cowpox," similar to smallpox in the red boils it produced, but not nearly as dangerous. More importantly, once milkmaids had recovered from cowpox, they seemed to be immune from smallpox...