![]() ![]() ![]() Until now, mRNA vaccines have only been used as a novel treatment for cancer. In 2020, top scientists came together from all over the world to help develop a new type of vaccine for COVID-19: an mRNA vaccine. Five main types of vaccines have been developed against roughly 20 different infectious diseases and are estimated to prevent 2 to 3 million deaths per year. Vaccination comes from the Latin word vacca, which means cow, because early vaccinations used biomaterials from cows to inoculate humans against a disease.įast forward 1020 years, and vaccine technology has dramatically improved. Variolation was the predecessor to vaccination. The concept of protecting people from a disease by giving them a product of it was called variolation, named after the virus that causes smallpox: variola virus. Because of the success of this concept, it caught on and spread to different civilizations, whose scientists started building on the back of it. On average, three out of 10 people were dying of smallpox, so this was a public health victory. While most people typically got symptoms of smallpox after doing this, they rarely died from the disease. This was done either by rubbing pus from a cow pustule into a cut on an arm, or inhaling it through the nose. In 1000 AD in China, people began to use the pus from cows with cowpox to inoculate humans against smallpox. Smallpox involved flu-like symptoms with a rash made up of "pustules," or bumps on the skin containing pus.Ī variation of smallpox called cowpox later appeared in cows. Where there was civilization, there was smallpox, and where there was smallpox, there was a need to stop it. It all started with smallpox, a devastating disease dating back to around 300 BC. From Smallpox Protection to Novel mRNA Technology ![]()
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