Voltaire wrote that in his time, 80 percent of people got small pox and 20 percent died of it. Edward Jenner thought something could be done about it and the World Health Organization decided how to get the result out worldwide. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp is from the year the world experienced it’s last large outbreak of small pox in Somalia. The stamp sort of implies that the way it was eradicated was to line up everyone to get a shot, the way it was done in the UK and the USA. This was not thought possible for the third world so the WHO adopted a strategy of keeping a close eye out for outbreaks and then vaccinate heavily locally.
Todays stamp is issue C335, a 60 Franc airmail stamp issued by Togo on January 9th, 1978. It was a two airmail stamp issue in different denominations that was also available as a souvenir sheet. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents cancelled to order.
So what to do about the very deadly small pox. It was noticed that milkmaids were not getting the virus. It was postulated that having been exposed to the similar but much less deadly cow pox they had developed an immunity. In 1796, English physician and scientist Edward Jenner scraped the puss off of blisters on the hand of milkmaid Sarah. She had caught cow pox from a cow named Blossom. He then injected the puss in two shots, one in each arm into the eight year old son of his gardener named Albert. Albert got a bad fever later that day but recovered with no signs of the disease. Albert was then repeatedly directly injected with small pox but did not come down with the disease. Jenner made a report on his findings to the Royal Academy but they decided to hold off publication until he repeated with similar success 23 more times including his toddler son. The hide of Blossom now hangs on the wall of Saint George Medical School library and it is generally agreed that Edward Jenner saved more human lives than anyone on earth.
The vaccination program spread rapidly in the third world starting in 1968. The last outbreak in the western hemisphere was in Brazil in 1971. The last outbreak in east Asia was in Indonesia in 1972. The last one in India was Bangladesh in 1975 and the last in Africa was in 1978 in Somalia. These were all places that had previously many cases. In 1980, small pox was declared eradicated worldwide. There are still tiny stocks of the virus in a few of the worlds research labs and the last world death from small pox was a scientist studying it.
Well my drink is empty. As we brace ourselves to get the shot of the Covid vaccine, think of poor Albert having to take shot after shot of the actual virus to prove the vaccine worked. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.