A 300-Year-Old Tale of One Woman's Quest to Stop a Deadly Virus | Hacker News Reader

A 300-Year-Old Tale of One Woman's Quest to Stop a Deadly Virus

npr.org

90 pointsVigier18 comments

I'm not sure why they put "a Deadly Virus" in the title, not "a Smallpox Epidemic". Is smallpox as a concept becoming an obscure thing?

"Deadly virus" gets more clicks.

It’s not inaccurate so that’s good, and don’t see it being misleading either way

The vast majority of the world's population was born after smallpox was eradicated in the wild.

IDK how many people out of 10 would correctly answer the question "what was smallpox and what was its cause"? One in ten?

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication in most parts of the word it spread until 1960-1970, so I expect most people with more than 60 years old to know. From https://ourworldindata.org/age-structure the 65+ group is 10% of the current population.

I'm younger, but I remember horror stories from my parents about smallpox and polio (mostly about polio).

My children, ... I don't know. I can check later, but I guess my older daughter know, but's perhaps it's like horror stories about her grandparent epoch.

Perhaps we should pick a day and make a big annual commemoration worldwide.

Somewhat relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2448/

Let me tell you all about that, in a much more coherent article.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/

I don't see anything incoherent about the OP article. It's just more tightly focused on Montague's role.

Anything with "pox" in the name, should give a hint.

They obviously did that to increase the click count.

Folks kind of know that smallpox was a problem, but a lot of folks don't have any personal reference for it nor have any real reference for how deadly it was. The US stopped routine vaccinations for it in 1972, after all, and they cheered when they declared it eradicated in 1980. Multiple generations have been born since then. A few folks born after it was eradicated are grandparents now.

Honestly, syphilis has a similar story and it is still around: Sure, there is some shame around it, much like other STDs, but we can cure it. And wow, it is a horrible disease, eating away at folks.

"Deadly virus" will attract more attention than "smallpox epidemic" because it highlights the parallels with the coronavirus pandemic.

This is how popular culture dealt with a virus in 1950. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5v3tkZ8fiQ

Ten Drugs by Thomas Hager has a fascinating chapter about Lady Mary Montagu’s story.

https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Drugs-Powders-History-Medicine/dp...

What a turn of events at the end. Without this lady, even though Edward Jenner may have survived and even though this method was already a thing in other parts of the world, I think we can say it was a big influence in his career as doctor later on. Not only because he received the treatment as kid but for all the political nonsense around it.

It looks like someone at npr caught up with the perfectly functioning and compliant text only option.

it's still working for me, maybe a temporary issue? https://text.npr.org/972978143

> "We don't know exactly why or how it works, we just know that it does work," says Michael Kinch, an associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written a book on vaccination. Kinch and others suspect this form of inoculation may have worked because it introduced the smallpox virus through the skin, rather than the lungs.

This is really interesting, I wonder if we have any evidence of similar behavior of other viruses?

It's insane that we don't know this. Are we not studying this?

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