Words matter. These are the best Smallpox Quotes from famous people such as Larry Brilliant, Barton Gellman, William S. Burroughs, Jared Diamond, Michael Specter, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.
The CIA now assesses that four nations – Iraq, North Korea, Russia and, to the surprise of some specialists, France – have undeclared samples of the smallpox virus.
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World’s Indian population.
Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia.
In 1967, the world health community launched a global effort to eradicate smallpox. It took a coordinated, worldwide effort, required the commitment of every government, and cost $130 million dollars. By 1977, smallpox had disappeared.
The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there’s only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.
While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.
The thing is I think vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we have. I’m a big fan and a great fan of the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine, for example.
The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.
There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid.
In ‘Pox: An American History,’ Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.
In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.
I hope that some day the practice of producing cowpox in human beings will spread over the world – when that day comes, there will be no more smallpox.
I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.
In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the ‘arm to arm of the blacks,’ that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.
I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases – smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication. Like any medication, they also should be – what shall we say? – approved by a regulatory board that people can trust.
For long-duration exploration missions, NASA is looking for folks with a lot of operational, hands-on experience, people who have been in field-type situations such as military deployments. In my case, I worked in the Congo and in Biosafety Level 4 labs on smallpox.
When some states introduced mandatory smallpox vaccinations during the epidemic of 1898-1903, Americans resisted by the thousands. The ensuing battles produced medical conventions and case law that altered the balance between government authority and medical practice, in favor of federal control.
Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.
