In human history, smallpox, the Black Death, cholera and other plagues have caused an alarming number of deaths.
The earliest recorded smallpox outbreak occurred in ancient Egypt.
The mummy of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses V who died in BC 1 156 showed signs of smallpox rash.
/kloc-At the end of 0/5, when Europeans set foot on the American continent, there were 20-30 million indigenous people living here. After about 100 years, the indigenous population is less than1000000.
European colonists gave blankets used by smallpox patients to Indians.
Subsequently, the plague raged, and mumps, measles, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever from Europe followed.
/kloc-in the 1970s, British doctor edward jenner discovered vaccinia, and human beings were finally able to resist smallpox virus. In the following 300 years, the disease made a comeback in Europe many times, and later scholars estimated that as many as 200 million people died of this plague.
1820s, Britain invented the vaccinia vaccine to prevent smallpox.
The mortality rate of smallpox patients is still as high as one third.
Later, developed countries gradually controlled the disease, but it is still prevalent in rural Africa.
From 1967, the last large-scale campaign to eliminate smallpox was carried out.
At present, smallpox virus is only kept in the following two laboratories for research.
The last natural patient with mild smallpox appeared in Somalia, Africa, on1October 26th, 1977+65438.
Ja Parker, a British medical photographer, became the last patient in the world when he contracted smallpox from the laboratory in 1978.
(Not long after, Professor Henry Bedson, the head of the laboratory, committed suicide.
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1979101On 26th October, the United Nations World Health Organization announced in Nairobi, Kenya, that smallpox had been eradicated all over the world, and held a celebration ceremony for this purpose.
In recent two years, inspectors from the World Health Organization conducted a survey on the last four East African countries that have not yet declared smallpox eradication-Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti, and found that these four countries have indeed eliminated the disease, so they released this historic news.
1980 in may, the world health organization announced that smallpox had been successfully eradicated.
In this way, smallpox became the earliest human infectious disease that was completely eliminated, and at the same time, human beings knew the least about smallpox.
Smallpox killed millions of people before it was completely eliminated by the global vaccination campaign in 1980.
These virus samples are only legally kept in the United States and Russia.