Smallpox Quotes

Harriet Washington, in ‘Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,’ documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the ‘arm to arm of the blacks,’ that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.

For long-duration exploration missions, NASA is looking for folks with a lot of operational, hands-on experience, people who have been in field-type situations such as military deployments. In my case, I worked in the Congo and in Biosafety Level 4 labs on smallpox.

The thing is I think vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we have. I’m a big fan and a great fan of the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine, for example.

It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia.

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases – smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication. Like any medication, they also should be – what shall we say? – approved by a regulatory board that people can trust.

I hope that some day the practice of producing cowpox in human beings will spread over the world – when that day comes, there will be no more smallpox.

You don’t have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.

In 1967, the world health community launched a global effort to eradicate smallpox. It took a coordinated, worldwide effort, required the commitment of every government, and cost $130 million dollars. By 1977, smallpox had disappeared.

Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World’s Indian population.

The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there’s only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.

There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid.

How did we cure polio, smallpox and send a man to the moon? How did we decode the human genome in just 13 years? Collaboration. Focus on a specific goal, and teamwork.

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.

In ‘Pox: An American History,’ Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.

When some states introduced mandatory smallpox vaccinations during the epidemic of 1898-1903, Americans resisted by the thousands. The ensuing battles produced medical conventions and case law that altered the balance between government authority and medical practice, in favor of federal control.

The CIA now assesses that four nations – Iraq, North Korea, Russia and, to the surprise of some specialists, France – have undeclared samples of the smallpox virus.