Vaccines

Vaccines are substances that prevent the spread of disease. Giving people vaccines can save
millions of lives. For example, smallpox killed some 2 million people in 1967. By 1979 the disease
had disappeared. This change resulted from a worldwide program of vaccination.
How Vaccines Work
Many diseases are caused by tiny germs called bacteria or viruses. When people are vaccinated
against a disease, they are purposely given the bacteria or virus that causes the disease. They can
receive the vaccine in a shot, by mouth, or by a nose spray.
The bacteria or virus in a vaccine is dead or weakened. It causes little if any sickness in the person
who receives it. Instead it causes the body's immune system to make proteins called antibodies,
which fight disease. If the same bacteria or virus enters the body later on, the immune system will
know how to fight it off.
History

An English doctor named Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in 1796. He saw that people who
got the mild disease called cowpox rarely got smallpox, which is more serious. He did experiments
to find out why. He scratched material from a cowpox sore into the skin of a healthy boy. The boy
got cowpox. Then Jenner scratched material from a smallpox sore into the boy's arm. The boy
stayed healthy. The cowpox material was a vaccine against smallpox.
The French scientist Louis Pasteur was another important researcher. In the 1880s he developed a
vaccine against rabies. He used a weakened form of the rabies virus to protect against a full attack
by the same virus.
Since Pasteur's time, scientists have produced vaccines against many diseases. In the middle of the
1900s Jonas Salk created a vaccine that almost wiped out polio. Vaccines have also been developed
for mumps, measles, cholera, plague, tuberculosis, influenza, and hepatitis.