Edward Jenner 's The World 's First Vaccination As A Preventive Treatment Essay

The history of vaccinations begin with Edward Jenner, the country doctor from Gloucestershire who found, growing on cows, a nearly harmless virus the protected people from smallpox. Jenner’s vaccine was safer, more reliable, and more durable than variolation, and it is still the only vaccine to have eliminated its reason for being-in 1980, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease extinct. For nearly a century and a half, smallpox was the only vaccine routinely administered, and it saved millions of lives . But the controversy that marked the return of the vaccine, amid bioterrorism hysteria in 2002, was only the latest twist in the remarkable, mysterious life of vaccines.

Vaccinations have been actively used for over 200 years now and have been effective for over 200 years as well. Western medicine’s introduction to the practice is said to have occurred within the eighteenth century, when a traveling British aristocrat, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, reported her observations of Turkish children being injected with pus from smallpox victims. Although this practice seemed quite harsh, most of these children would contract only a mild version of the illness. In return, these recipients would retain a lifelong immunity to this terrible disease (World of Microbiology & Immunology). Similarly, in the United States, a Puritan minister by the name of Cotton Mather learned about inoculation from his African slave, Onesimus. Onesimus claimed that he was inoculated with smallpox pus and never caught the tragic disease (Williams). This type of medicinal treatment was initially rejected by most Western practitioners. They felt it was a dangerous and barbarous practice, but vaccination gained a tremendous amount of support at the turn of the nineteenth century when English physician Edward Jenner created a new smallpox vaccine derived from the relatively mild cowpox virus (Riedel). There’s no doubt that history has shown the positive outcomes of immunization and continued to show them as technology and medicine progressed.

Although there is no scientific proof that vaccines cause autism, proponents still believe that they do. The theory that vaccines cause autism were based on unproven facts and falsified information (DeStefano 81). In an article called CNS Drugs, the author writes about how a man named AJ Wakefield stun the public with a theory that the MMR vaccine may cause autism and how enterocolitis (bowel dysfunction) and MMR vaccine may be linked to autism (DeStefano 831). Even though Wakefield falsified information and his theories were proven to be discredited many people still

Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Vaccines Edward Jenner (1749-1823) trained in London, under John Hunter, and was an army surgeon for a period of time. After that, he spent his whole career as a country doctor in his home county, Gloucestershire (West of England). His research was based on careful case studies and clinical observation more than a hundred years before scientists could explain what viruses and diseases actually were. His innovative new method was successful to such an extent that by 1840 the British government had banned alternative preventive treatments against smallpox. [IMAGE]

The controversy over the MMR vaccine started in the late 1990’s when Andrew Wakefield suggested that there was a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism in a scientific paper which he had published with several other co-authors. Although there has not been a proven fact that the MMR vaccine is the causation to autism it has brought concerns to parents and has caused a major drop in immunization rates. For example, Dannetun et al., 2005 states that, “Fear of side effects and beliefs

In order to investigate more about Wakefield’s study, Brian Deer, a journalist of British Medical Journal, carefully talked to the parents of all children who were participated in the study. Interestingly enough, he revealed the fraud behind Wakefield’s research. The Lancet, the journal that reported Wakefield’s study, retracted the paper soon afterwards (Deer). However, the real trouble still exists. Though it has been proved by many researchers that the MRR doesn’t cause autism, many people perceive the vaccine as a threat. Dr.Nemeroff once said “it is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water even after the real sewage is gone” (Greene).

Andrew Wakefield is a former gastroenterologist and medical researcher who was discharged from his medical register in the UK, because of his dishonest research paper he released back in 1998, that analysed a possible link between measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the presence of autism and bowel disease (Godlee, F., et al, 2011). Wakefield's research generated a substantial scare for the MMR vaccine and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination (DeStefano, F., Chen, R.T., 1999). After the paper was published by the Lancet medical newspaper, other reviews were trying to repeat Wakefield's conclusions,

This led to the support of various unproven vaccine-autism theories by parents in both the UK and America. After findings of intestinal disease in children with autism, Wakefield claimed that separating the MMR into three different vaccinations would be safer. Since then, Wakefield’s research has been discredited, he was charged with serious professional misconduct by the General Medical Council for violating several ethical practices, and he was investigated for failing to disclose conflict of interest – a pending patent on a rival measles vaccine (Gross, 2009). Although false, many still believe wholeheartedly that vaccines are harmful.

Doctor Andrew Wakefield’s study, published the 28th of February, 1998 in the scientific magazine The Lancet, is constantly cited as being the catalyst for the ongoing debate on whether or not vaccinations have any connections to autism. In the case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s study on the connections between autism and the M.M.R. (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, proper scientific experimental procedures were not seen to, such as his not including a control group. That is to say, in an act transgressing scientific integrity, he documented the cases

One such factor helping to manifest these large-scale epidemics is a study from 1998 by Andrew Wakefield, which claimed that there was a direct link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine (Smith 1). As a result, many parents refused to vaccinate their children out of fear, and vaccine-preventable diseases like measles began reappearing more in both America and Britain, the place where Wakefield conducted his study (Cohen 2). Although a later investigation by the British Medical Journal discovered that Wakefield had distorted or altered the medical records of all twelve of the study’s participants and that he had been paid $674,000 USD by lawyers attempting to sue vaccine manufacturers, the atmosphere of apprehension surrounding vaccines is still strong among many individuals, and especially parents (Cohen 1-2). But despite all the controversy and the scientifically unsupported arguments of anti-vaccine sympathizers,

The current issue I have selected to discuss is vaccinations. In particular, I will be addressing the anti-vaccination movement that has gained popularity in recent years and the contributing biases that influenced its emergence. One event stands out at as a major contributing factor to the growth of the anti-vaccination movement, the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that was published by the English medical journal, Lancet. This study claimed to show a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Even though it was just one small study, the media picked it up and it became hugely publicized.

The autism scare started 17 years ago, in the year 1998, when a paper was published in the British medical journal called The Lancet. Andrew Wakefield, M.D., a British gastroenterologist, and his colleagues were the authors of this paper which started the scare of immunizations causing autism. "Wakefield had a case study of eight children who had received the MMR and then developed symptoms of autism, says Paul Offit, M.D., chief of infectious diseases at the Children 's Hospital of Philadelphia. He also believed they had abnormal intestinal tracts and proposed a syndrome -- linking intestinal inflammation from receiving the MMR with the development of autism.” (Rope)

In 1998 a study was published by Andrew Wakefield theorizing that there was a link between autism symptoms and receiving a MMR vaccination. However, his findings are to be inconclusive considering he did not take the proper procedures to conduct a controlled study. First, he did not include control subjects in his study, so the results cannot be compared properly if there were any changes in the subjects. Second, the endoscopic or neuropsychological assessments were not done blind and the data was not collected systematically or completely. Third, the symptoms found between the children with autism and gastrointestinal problems were inconsistent. In reality, many health groups are theorizing that a vaccination does not cause autism by any

Live Science Contributor, Stephanie Pappas tell us that, “Wakefield was getting money from lawyers planning on suing vaccine makers, and he owned a patent on an alternative to the MMR (measles) vaccines,” [2] this statement is clear evidence of fraudulent activity and proves that Wakefield had corrupt reasons for undergoing this study in the first place. The second flaw to Wakefield's paper was the questionable practises of his study, for starters he based his study on twelve children that he “cherry picked,” and “although the paper claimed that cognitive problems developed a few days after the MMR vaccine, a simple investigation of hospital records revealed that wasnt so; and in several cases parents reported problems before the vaccine,” [2]. In summary, the investigation was sloppy and provided no tangible evidence that links autism to the MMR vaccine. Furthermore, it should be noted that the the link between autism and vaccines is purely coincidental, the symptoms of autism typically appear at around the age that vaccines are administered, in fact director of the Vaccine Education Centre at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr Paul Offit confirms this says, “Children get their first dose of the MMR vaccine at 12 to 15 months, the age at which autism symptoms typically

It used to be that vaccinations were considered a normal part of childhood, right along with loosing teeth and toilet training. However, in recent years vaccinations have become an extremely hot button issue, with many parents actually choosing not to vaccinate their children. The idea seems preposterous considering how many people were left with twisted backs, and withered limbs due to polio, or the amount of deaths as a result of measles. To see someone who has been left in an iron lung from a disease that is now preventable, and still choose not to prevent the disease seems absolutely asinine, and yet many parents are doing just that. Sadly, much of the fear of vaccines stems from Dr. Andrew Wakefield, and his fraudulent research that