40 years to remember humanity’s victory over viruses

GENEVA-The world marks an anniversary associated with Friday as scientists vie for treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. Humankind is humanity’s only true victory over infectious diseases by eradicating smallpox 40 years ago.

On May 8, 1980, representatives of all World Health Organization (WHO) member countries met in Geneva to officially announce that the smallpox-causing smallpox virus had been dismissed in a book about two centuries after the discovery of the vaccine. Declared

Smallpox is a highly contagious disease that is transmitted through droplets during close contact with other people and contaminated objects, causing high fever and rash, which causes the survivors to permanently look ugly, I often go blind.

But many did not survive. The virus killed up to 30% of all infected individuals and is estimated to have killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

Smallpox is believed to have been present for thousands of years, and the earliest recorded evidence of bullous skin lesions is believed to have been caused by a disease found in Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses V mummies. ..

The devastating disease was also the target of the world’s first vaccine, discovered in 1796 by scientist and physician Edward Jenner.

-“Public will”-

But the idea of ​​completely eradicating smallpox emerged about two centuries later in a “temporary” detent “between Russians and Americans” in 1958, according to US epidemiologist Larry Brilliant. Told AFP.

With smallpox prevalent in more than 30 countries and still killing more than two million people a year, the Soviet Union proposed how global cooperation could benefit and eradicate the disease.

They made a proposal during a meeting of the WHO Annual Meeting.

“Soon the United States agreed,” Brilliant said, juxtaposing the leadership and international cooperation seen at the time during the Cold War with the “nationalism” that colors the current response to the new coronavirus.

“There was a will of the people,” he said.

Forty years later, the world has recovered from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, and decision-makers have set out to work hard to isolate people with smallpox and to track their contacts for inspiration. Rosamund Lewis in charge of smallpox files should be directed at WHO.

-Lessons for COVID-19-

“You can learn a lot from smallpox about COVID’s response,” she told AFP.

WHO initially didn’t have the funding needed to take the smallpox eradication seriously, but when the global eradication campaign was launched in 1967, experts sought to find out who was infected. “Did.

It took too many countries too long to understand the importance of this basic public health “weapon” to COVID-19, and it spread all over the world to over 260,000 people in a few months. I lamented that I had killed.

Experts stress that contact tracing is crucial until vaccines for new viruses are developed and available.

Angela Teresa Ciuffi, professor of microbiology at the University of Lausanne, told AFP that the discovery of the smallpox vaccine 1,000 years ago was a “principle of victory” for the disease.

Jenner came up with the idea of ​​a vaccine after observing that a milk maid who had previously caught cowpox did not catch smallpox, and used a usually fairly harmless virus to immunize against a much deadly disease. Did.

Prior to the advent of the vaccine, he was involved in vaccination against smallpox, inserting powdered smallpox scabs and liquids into the superficial wounds on the patient’s skin.

This process produced an immune effect, but “the inconvenience was to allow smallpox to circulate,” said Anne Marie Mulan, director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research in France.

Improving the vaccine, including the elimination of the need for refrigeration, has significantly improved access and availability to the vaccine, paving the way for eradication campaigns.

The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was found in Somalia in 1977, after a decade of massive attack.

However, a year later, a British medical photographer who worked near the Smallpox Institute was infected and died.

-The threat of bioterrorism? –

Since then, global debate has escalated as to whether samples of the chickenpox virus should be destroyed.

Only two sites in the world are allowed to store smallpox samples. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, USA and the National Research Center for Viruses and Biotechnology (VECTOR) in Novosibirsk, Russia.

Washington and Moscow have long maintained the importance of retaining samples for research purposes.

However, even decades after the eradication, the smallpox threat remains significant, and the risk of remaining virus samples after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 is becoming a threat to bioterrorism.

Compared to smallpox, “COVID-19 is just a training exercise,” David Evans, a virologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, told AFP.

If reintroduced, “smallpox can be devastating in the first few weeks when it enters the world of predominantly immunologically naive people,” says the German Institute for Microbial Research. Rosin Ehman of the place warned.

“COVID-19 showed how long it would take for the public health system to activate logistics and crisis intervention management,” she told AFP.