Children smallpox

Edward Jenner inoculates child to protect him from smallpox... 

Diabetes mellitus occurred in a 1-year-old child about 4 weeks after smallpox vaccination (1073). 

Next I examine my body for smallpox symptoms. A week ago my father told me that he had discovered a method that would protect me from ever having the disease. I shall engraft you with the pus taken from the pox of a child with a very mild form of the smallpox. You will probably feel unwell, but that s all. Afterward you will be safe forever from the infection. This is a method that I saw tried last year on six condemned convicts. Each was inoculated with the disease, recovered, and pardoned. I shall offer the same treatment to anyone in the village who wishes to accept. He made me roll up my sleeve, scratched my skin with a needle, and dropped a yellowish liquid from a phial onto the wound. My arm felt sore afterward but nothing worse has happened yet. 

The threshold was worn to a deep curve by centuries of Selden feet and there were two steep steps down to the porch, so I had to lean on her for balance. I didn t look back as I waited for her to close the door, but leaving that church so abruptly to go and find Sarah was the hardest thing I had ever done, harder than holding out my arm to be engrafted with smallpox, harder than adding saltpeter to the alchemical mixture, harder even than telling my father that I was pregnant with Aislabie s child. 

A 33-year-old patient presents with a maculopapular rash of no discernible pattern, and he is very agitated and concerned. He says that he had chicken pox as a child, and the books and magazines he has read indicate that it all leads to one conclusion smallpox. What might you say to this individual to calm his fears ... 

Unfortunately, the nation-wide smallpox epidemics of 1816-1819 and 1825-1826 revealed the serious limitations of vaccination, primarily with regard to the impermeance of the immunity, and inoculation became popular once again. The terrible epidemic of 1837-1840, during which 42,000 people died in England and Wales, reinforced the need for some kind of national campaign of vaccination in order to eradicate the disease. All the time inoculation was still available there was a reservoir of the virus in the community, and in order to overcome this problem, the Parliament passed a bill banning the practice in 1840. A second bill in 1853 made vaccination compulsory for every child before they were three months old, and Acts of 1861, 1867 and 1871 introduced tough penalties for non-compliance. 

Fig. 27-8. Progressive vaccinia or vaccinia necrosum. As seen in this child, progressive viral replication at the inoculation site in an immunocompromised individual leads to inexorable local tissue destruction. Reprinted with permission from Fenner F, Henderson DA, Arita I, Jezek Z, Ladnyi ID. Smallpox and Its Eradication. Geneva, Switzerland World Health Organization 1988 298. Photograph by C. H. Kempe.

Marsden JP, Greenfield CRM. Inherited smallpox. Arch Dis Child. 1934 9 309-314. 

Bloch H. Edward Jenner The history and effects of smallpox, inoculation, and vaccination. Am J Dis Child. 1993 147 772-774. 

Experiment Intentionally expose a healthy child to cowpox and later to smallpox. 

Because child did not contract smallpox, immunity seemed to have resulted from cowpox exposure. 

In cases with a possible hereditary predisposition to a disease it is hard to tell what the influence of vaccination may be. With this in mind it is interesting to note a recent case report of a diabetes mellitus, appearing in a one-year-old child about 4 weeks after a smallpox vaccination (27 ). 

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