Word: smallpox
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...Smallpox eradication is a way to see how that works not simply on the drawing board or in theory but actually on the ground,” said Manela...
...Sept. 4 news article "Manela Appointed History Professor" gave the wrong disease in stating that Erez Manela is studying the global campaign that eradicated malaria. In fact, he is studying the eradication of smallpox. Malaria has not been eradicated...