How many has smallpox killed

Rhazes was a Persian doctor who worked in the main hospital of Baghdad. He ranks with Hippocrates and Galen as one of the founders of clinical medicine and is widely regarded as the greatest physician of Islam and the Medieval Ages. His writings on medicine influenced physicians well through the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century. And his work on smallpox and measles was one of the first scientific treatments of infectious diseases.

His explanation of why survivors of smallpox do not develop the disease a second time is the first theory of acquired immunity. The patterns of disease transmission often paralleled peoples' travel and migration routes. Smallpox was brought to the Americas with the arrival of Spanish colonists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it is widely acknowledged that smallpox infection killed more Aztec and Inca people than the Spanish Conquistadors, helping to destroy those empires.

Smallpox continued to ravage Europe, Asia, and Africa for centuries. In Europe, near the end of the eighteenth century, the disease accounted for nearly , deaths each year, including five kings. Of those surviving, one-third were blinded. The worldwide death toll was staggering and continued well into the twentieth century, where mortality has been estimated at to million.

This number vastly exceeds the combined total of deaths in all world wars. This person, photographed in Bangladesh, has smallpox lesions on skin of his midsection. In the United States, more than , cases of smallpox were recorded in Strong declines occurred after that because of the widespread use of preventive vaccines.

By , fewer than 50 Americans per year died of smallpox. The idea of intentionally inoculating healthy people to protect them against smallpox dates back to China in the sixth century. Chinese physicians ground dried scabs from smallpox victims along with musk and applied the mixture to the noses of healthy people.

In India, healthy people protected themselves by sleeping next to smallpox victims or wearing infected peoples' shirts. In Africa and the Near East, matter taken from the smallpox pustulesraised lesions on the skin the contain pusof mild cases was inoculated through a scratch in an arm or vein. The goal was to cause a mild infection of smallpox and stimulate an immune response that would give the person immunity from the natural infection. This process was called variolation.

Unfortunately, the amount of virus used would vary and some would contract smallpox from the inoculation and die. Nonetheless, this preventive approach became popular in China and South East Asia. Knowledge of the treatment spread to India, where European traders first saw it. Variolation is the inoculation of matter taken from the smallpox pustules of mild cases through a scratch in an arm or vein. Used by people in the past, the goal was to cause a mild infection of smallpox and stimulate an immune response that would give the person immunity from the natural infection.

In , while accompanying her husband, the British ambassador to Turkey, in Constantinople she came across the ancient Turk practice of inoculating children with smallpox matter. Initially horrified at this seemingly savage practice, she learned that a child was protected from the ravages of smallpox through this process. She then had her six-year-old son inoculated while in Turkey, and in , in the presence of Royal Society Members, she had her daughter inoculated.

This led to adoption of variolation, mainly by the aristocracy in England and Central Europe. Before long, variolation to prevent smallpox was widespread. Napoleon did the same with his army before they invaded Egypt. During his training as a physician, Edward Jenner learned from nearby milkmaids that after they contracted cowpox they never got smallpox.

Cowpox is a far milder disease than smallpox, yet the diseases are quite similar. In , Jenner decided to test the theory that infectious material from a person with a milder similar disease could protect against a more severe disease.

He put some pus from a cowpox pustule on small cuts made on the arm of James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy. Eight days later, Phipps developed cowpox blisters on the scratches. Register for free Already a member? More information. Supplementary notes. Other statistics on the topic. Historical Data Number of reported cases of smallpox in the United States Historical Data Smallpox death rate in select European countries during the Great Pandemic Historical Data Smallpox death rate in Britain Historical Data Share of total deaths due to smallpox by age during the Great Pandemic of Aaron O'Neill.

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Please log in to access our additional functions. Yes, let me download! Exclusive Corporate feature. Corporate Account. Statista Accounts: Access All Statistics. This analysis would have allowed for a definite diagnosis; authorities have not allowed investigators to extract tissue samples from the mummies since then. The graph shows the deaths per citizens from over the long-run, dating from to in European countries for which data was available.

Two phenomena are illustrated here. First, Swedish data which pre-dates an effective means against smallpox in shows the large disease burden and endemicity of smallpox in the 18th century. In peak years, up to 7 out of Swedes died of smallpox and the volatile nature of outbreaks is a symptom of a disease being endemic explained in our section on epidemiological definitions further below. Austria and Belgium, both of which never made smallpox vaccination mandatory, still recorded large numbers of smallpox deaths from onwards whereas other European countries displayed had already driven down smallpox fatalities significantly by then.

Nevertheless, smallpox was still endemic in every European country at the end of the 19th century. The chart depicts the number of smallpox cases by country, for most countries dating until Here we see that by the time the World Health Organization WHO launched its Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program in , most countries in Western Europe and North America had almost eliminated smallpox whilst the countries across South America, Africa and Asia, especially India, still recorded very large numbers note the large differences in color brackets below.

Global data on the number of smallpox cases is shown in the chart. Shown here is the number of reported smallpox cases worldwide from until the last case in Just the reported number of smallpox cases between and already amounted to Even though smallpox had a high visibility and should therefore be relatively easy to document, the lack of an international organization dedicated to global health means the number of reported cases is probably substantially lower than the true number of cases.

Crosby estimates that in million people were still being infected with smallpox every year while the chart on the reported cases below indicates only , for that same year. The reasons and extent of discrepancies between reported and estimated cases are discussed in our section on Data Quality.

The chart shows global case numbers as shown in the section above disaggregated by world region, extending to , the year of the last case globally. Even though absolute numbers are almost certainly far too low as explained above and in our section on Data Quality , it can be seen that in relative terms, South Asia had by far the highest number of smallpox cases. This was primarily driven by incidence in India: in , for instance, in a state that had reported approximately cases a week, the WHO search team found 10, cases.

The last variola major infection was recorded in Bangladesh in October , and the last variola minor infection occurred two years later in Merka, Somalia, on October 26th, During the following two years, WHO teams searched the African continent for further smallpox cases among those rash-like symptoms which is a symptom of numerous other diseases.

They found no further cases. The world map shows the year in which each country recorded the last endemic case of smallpox. Countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia eliminated smallpox several decades later in the s and 70s. In May , the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization, officially certified the global elimination of smallpox, the first ever eradication of a disease in human history.

These are the only two known places that still hold samples of the variola viruses for research purposes. Before the year , Indians and the Chinese had already observed that contraction of smallpox protected children against any future outbreaks of the disease.

As a consequence they developed a procedure that involved the nasal inhalation of dried smallpox scabs by three-year-olds. Another commonly practiced technique whose geographic and temporal origin are unknown encompassed the injection of the liquid found inside the pustules of a smallpox patient underneath the skin of a healthy person.

This would usually result in a milder infection of smallpox after which the person was immune against the disease. Both practices became known as variolation inoculation techniques.

The disadvantage of variolation, however, was that during the course of the mild infection the person became a carrier of the disease and could infect other people. This meant that the practice usually reduced the severeness of an infection and the likelihood of deaths but that it would never lead to eliminating the virus. If anything, it helped to spread the virus in a population even further and thereby encouraged its survival. She herself had suffered a smallpox infection and lost her younger brother to the disease at the age of She first learned about variolation when she arrived in Istanbul in , where variolation was commonly practiced.

She later had the embassy inoculate her two children. News spread among the royal family and after following trials Maitland successfully inoculated the two daughters of the Princess of Wales in Thereafter, variolation became a common practice in Great Britain and became known in other European countries. It became an even more established practice when the French King Louis XV died of smallpox in May of and his successor and grandson Louis XVI was inoculated with the variola virus one month later.

At the end of the 18th century British surgeon and physician Edward Jenner pioneered the first ever vaccination against an infectious disease. He himself had been inoculated with smallpox at the age of 8 and later as a surgeon, variolation was part of his work. At the time unknowingly, he had discovered that the cowpox and variola viruses were members of the same orthopoxvirus family.

He hypothesized that variolation using the cowpox virus would protect children against smallpox as well. Since cowpox infections were much milder and never fatal, this would eliminate the problem of variolated children being carriers of smallpox and sometimes dying of the virus developing into a full-blown infection.

On top of protection against the symptoms, it could reduce the stock of humans that the variola virus needed for survival and brought elimination and eventually eradication of smallpox into the realm of possibility. In May , Jenner inoculated a boy with cowpox, and then a few months later with the smallpox virus.

When the boy did not develop any smallpox symptoms in response to being variolated, his hypothesis of the cowpox offering protection from smallpox was confirmed motivating his further research trials. Initially, Jenner faced major barriers to spreading the word about his discovery. When he submitted a paper outlining his findings to the journal Philosophical Transactions edited by the Royal Society, it was rejected.

They even advised him not to pursue his ideas any further, pointing to the detrimental impact on his career and reputation. Undeterred, he published his work with an increased number of trials at his own expense two years later in He also went on to convince colleagues and supply them with vaccines in other British cities of his new procedure that became known as vaccination derived from the Latin word for cow, vacca.

Meanwhile, vaccination had spread to most of Europe and New England. Before the introduction of a smallpox vaccine in , on average 7. Following introduction of the vaccine, we see a clear decline in smallpox deaths.

It was only with the establishment of the World Health Organization WHO in the aftermath of World War II that international quality standards for the production of smallpox vaccines were introduced. This shifted the fight against smallpox from a national to international agenda. It was also the first time that global data collection on the prevalence of smallpox was undertaken.

Nonetheless, skepticism about the feasibility of eradication prevailed and the WHO lacked experience in administering projects that required both technical and material support, as well as coordination across countries. Furthermore, the funding provided to the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme was insufficient to meet global needs, resulting mostly in vaccine shortages. Further still, continued globalization and growth of international air travel resulted in the continual re-introduction of the disease into countries that had previously managed to eliminate smallpox.

Initially, the WHO had pursued a strategy of mass vaccination which attempted to vaccinate as many people as possible, hoping that herd immunity explained in our vaccine entry would protect the whole population. This is known as the ring vaccination principle.