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Vaccines Of Vaccines For Other Diseases

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Every year, vaccines save more than 2.5 million children, which is similar to about 285 every hour; however, not everyone in the world believes that vaccines are safe (ProCon). In 1796, British Doctor Edward Jenner created the first vaccine to prevent smallpox by noticing that the milkmaids who were exposed to cowpox were immune to it (Ballarlo). Scientists realized the importance of this and began to research on the creation of vaccines for other illnesses. Unexpectedly, it was French chemist Louis Pasteur who, while researching why there is spoilage in wine, found “germs” (Burge). From that discovery, he speculated that if germs could be found in wine, then it can probably be found in animals, plants, and humans too. This was how…show more content…
His experiment consisted of two people, a young milkmaid who had cowpox and an eight-year-old boy. Firstly, he used the young milkmaid to infect the eight-year-old boy by taking “cowpox matter (Ballarlo)” from the milkmaid and injecting it into the boy’s arm. A week after the inoculation, the boy became ill, but that only lasted a day. With that confirmation, Jenner experimented with cowpox. At first, he was hesitant, because he was afraid that his theory might be wrong, which would lead to the death of the boy. In the end, the boy stayed healthy for weeks and that was when Jenner concluded his theory was right. He named his discovery “vaccine” after the Latin word for cowpox, but scientists and researchers adapted this name to describe any agent that was able help people build immunity towards diseases by injecting a milder version of the disease.
It was not until Pasteur’s discovery that vaccines were able to defend against more diseases. Pasteur had been looking for a way to create a vaccine for anthrax, a type of disease in sheeps and cattle, when a scientist sent him a head of a rooster that had died of chicken cholera, asking him to help find a way to prevent it. He accepted this challenge and found a way of growing chicken cholera germs in culture by putting germs into a container of chicken broth. However, they had to constantly grow more of these
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