Word: smallpox
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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, in fact, that...
That perception changed dramatically after Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks. Suddenly, vaccines were back in the headlines. The U.S. government was scrambling to build up its supplies of smallpox inoculations, and an anthrax vaccine that had been stuck in a legal and scientific morass for years was thrust back on the fast track...
That hasn't worked so far for deadly diseases like tuberculosis, malaria or AIDS, in part because no model for natural immunity exists for any of them. Thus scientists cannot crib from nature for vaccines, as Jenner did for smallpox. But that is changing as researchers get a sense of how many instruments in the immune-system orchestra they have at their disposal, and how to get the best performance from them. With HIV, for example, the virus mutates too rapidly. No sooner has the acquired immune system learned to identify and lock in on it than HIV develops...
...government allowed postal workers to continue breathing the air of a sorting facility filled with anthrax spores; it went tearing off to stock up on Cipro when many scientists believed it unnecessary and even dangerous; it wrung its hands about whether to order 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine--sowing its own kind of terror with its very indecision; and it allowed open speculation about quarantines to spread unchecked, without a clear consensus on the extent of its legal powers to impose them in the first place...
...Detecting: Environment Technology Group, a subsidiary of London-based Smiths Aerospace, plans to make 10 times more of its handheld biological detection systems, which sell in the $20,000 range and help emergency response crews measure for anthrax or smallpox. Likewise, an American firm called InVision, whose technology can sniff out explosives in public places, is doubling production...