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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe End of Plagues: The Global Battle Against Infectious Disease by John Rhodes (view source)
Revision as of 06:30, 20 October 2013
, 06:30, 20 October 2013no edit summary
Even the outcomes, or consequences, of clinical trials can have a deleterious effect on how accepted the vaccination would become in areas needing it, a fact which painfully postpones the expected date of eradication of a disease.
The relatively small, but insanely persistent, remnant of smallpox cases was just as frustrating as the presently tiny, but dogged, number of reported cases of polio. However, the number didn’t remain without reason in the case of smallpox – the practice of arm-to-arm vaccination, which spread conditions like tetanus, didn’t exactly convince people to put forth their veins. The outrageous suspicion that polio campaigns are in fact surreptitious sterilisation crusades is not the only thing on which parts of Nigeria base their resistance to polio vaccination. For one, a traumatising Pfizer trial of trovaflaxintrovafloxacin, a candidate for treating meningtitismeningitis, killed a number of children, and a certain degree of trust in Western medical researchers and practitioners. In more recent times, the well-circulated misconception of MMR vaccine’s link with autism saw sudden measles outbreaks in areas where the viral infection hadn’t been seen in years.
Jenner, who involved himself very much in getting the smallpox vaccine around in his native county of Gloucestershire, did not live to see his (somewhat modified) brainchild facilitate the eradication of smallpox from the face of the earth. The end of this plague is one which today inspires hope in the campaigners who travel to the ends of the earth with various vaccines. Vaccination is given in combination with surveillance containment of the target disease itself, at the behest of bigger and bigger bodies that are doing everything they can to recruit as many vaccinators and resources as possible. In the last pages of the book, Rhodes leaves behind the looming, dark clouds of continued refusal and avoidance of vaccination, and the creation of potential bio-weapons (consisting of the existing reservoirs of smallpox in a handful of countries). Instead, he expresses a wish to be able to tell Jenner the following concerning a plague poised to become the second one to be vanquished: ''the name of the last person in history to be naturally infected with polio''.
