[June 26th marks the 300th anniversary of Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston’s first inoculations against the raging smallpox epidemic. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boylston and other vaccine figures and histories, leading up to Friday’s post on the Covid vaccine!]
On three telling
stages in the history of a frustratingly persistent disease.
In the mid to
late 19th century, outbreaks of the measles devastated two different
South Pacific paradises. Beginning with a series
of deadly epidemics in 1848-1849 (including whooping cough and influenza as
well as measles), and continuing through much of the next decade, the disease
took roughly one-fifth of Hawaii’s population. In 1875, the disease was
introduced to the tropical island of Fiji by King Cakobau,
upon his return from a diplomatic trip to Australia, and before it was
contained it had killed
40,000 Fijians, roughly one-third of the small nation’s population. As
these and many other outbreaks make clear, measles, often perceived here in the
United States as nothing more than a potential childhood annoyance, has been as
deadly a worldwide epidemic as any, and remains so: it is estimated to have
killed roughly 200
million people between 1855 and 2005, and the World Health Organization
(WHO) estimated that 158,000
were killed in 2011 alone.
The fact that
the disease has come to be perceived so differently in late 20th
century America (and beyond) is due directly to two interconnected individuals.
In 1954, medical study of David Edmonston, a 13 year old infected with the
disease (one of many affected by an outbreak at a Boston private school),
allowed for the
virus that causes it to be isolated for the first time; the efforts of one
young researcher, Dr. Thomas Peebles, were instrumental in achieving this
success (as was the work of Tuesday’s subject, John Franklin Enders).
Subsequent work over the next decade to develop a vaccine culminated in the
1963 successful creation of one by Maurice
Hilleman, a researcher and vaccination
specialist working at Merck; Hilleman’s vaccine (eventually folded into
what is now known as the MMR
[Measles Mumps Rubella] shot) has been estimated
to prevent up to 1 million deaths each year. To my mind, few developments
capture the best of the 20th century better than vaccines, and their
combination of science, technology, research and collaboration, and
international efforts to improve lives and communities; by any measure,
Hilleman and the MMR certainly have to occupy prominent spots on that list.
Which brings us
to now, and a particularly frustrating 21st century trend. As those
WHO estimates indicate, measles has never been eradicated; but it has
nonetheless made
a striking recent return to our conversations, thanks in no small measure
to a new American community: the anti-vaccinaters.
This community has been around and making its controversial case for nearly two
decades, aided and abetted by a fraudulent
researcher and his hoax of a scientific study, but a recent outbreak of
measles, caused it seems by the presence of unvaccinated
and infected individuals at California’s Disneyland, has brought the
community and the disease together in our collective consciousness. There are
lots of ways to argue against this extreme and dangerous perspective, but to my
mind chief among them would have to be a better understanding of each of these
prior two stages: the long-term history and effects of measles, and the hugely
destructive force of outbreaks such as those in Hawaii and Fiji; and the vital
breakthroughs and successes of the vaccines, and the way they have turned
measles into something manageable instead. It’s difficult for me to imagine
anyone who would want a return to that earlier stage in the arc of this
epidemic.
Last
VaccineStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Vaccine histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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